"Buy all the rum and 'baccy there is in the world."
"And what after that?" they asked him.

"Eh?"
"What would you buy after that--after you had bought up all the rum

and tobacco there was in the world--what would you buy then?"
"After that? Oh! 'um!" (a long pause). "Oh!" (with inspiration) "why,

more 'baccy!"
Rum and tobacco he knew something of, and could therefore imagine

about. He did not know any other luxuries, therefore he could not
conceive of any others.

So if you ask one of these Utopian-dreaming gentry what, after they
had secured for their world all the electricity there was in the

Universe, and after every mortal thing in their ideal Paradise, was
done and said and thought by electricity, they could imagine as

further necessary to human happiness, they would probably muse for
awhile, and then reply, "More electricity."

They know electricity. They have seen the electric light, and heard
of electric boats and omnibuses. They have possibly had an electric

shock at a railway station for a penny.
Therefore, knowing that electricity does three things, they can go on

and "imagine" electricity doing three hundred things, and the very
great ones among them can imagine it doing three thousand things; but

for them, or anybody else, to imagine a new force, totally unconnected
with and different from anything yet known in nature, would be utterly

impossible.
Human thought is not a firework, ever shooting off fresh forms and

shapes as it burns; it is a tree, growing very slowly--you can watch
it long and see no movement--very silently, unnoticed. It was planted

in the world many thousand years ago, a tiny, sickly plant. And men
guarded it and tended it, and gave up life and fame to aid its growth.

In the hot days of their youth, they came to the gate of the garden
and knocked, begging to be let in, and to be counted among the

gardeners. And their young companions without called to them to come
back, and play the man with bow and spear, and win sweet smiles from

rosy lips, and take their part amid the feast, and dance, not stoop
with wrinkled brows, at weaklings' work. And the passers by mocked

them and called shame, and others cried out to stone them. And still
they stayed there laboring, that the tree might grow a little, and

they died and were forgotten.
And the tree grew fair and strong. The storms of ignorance passed

over it, and harmed it not. The fierce fires of superstition soared
around it; but men leaped into the flames and beat them back,

perishing, and the tree grew. With the sweat of their brow have men
nourished its green leaves. Their tears have moistened the earth

about it. With their blood they have watered its roots.
The seasons have come and passed, and the tree has grown and

flourished. And its branches have spread far and high, and ever fresh
shoots are bursting forth, and ever new leaves unfolding to the light.

But they are all part of the one tree--the tree that was planted on
the first birthday of the human race. The stem that bears them

springs from the gnarled old trunk that was green and soft when
white-haired Time was a little child; the sap that feeds them is drawn

up through the roots that twine and twist about the bones of the ages
that are dead.

The human mind can no more produce an original thought than a tree can
bear an original fruit. As well might one cry for an original note in

music as expect an original idea from a human brain.
One wishes our friends, the critics, would grasp this simple truth,

and leave off clamoring for the impossible, and being shocked because
they do not get it. When a new book is written, the high-class critic

opens it with feelings of faint hope, tempered by strong conviction of
coming disappointment. As he pores over the pages, his brow darkens

with virtuousindignation, and his lip curls with the Godlike contempt
that the exceptionally great critic ever feels for everybody in this

world, who is not yet dead. Buoyed up by a touching, but totally
fallacious, belief that he is performing a public duty, and that the

rest of the community is waiting in breathlesssuspense to learn his
opinion of the work in question, before forming any judgment

concerning it themselves, he, nevertheless, wearily struggles through
about a third of it. Then his long-suffering soul revolts, and he

flings it aside with a cry of despair.
"Why, there is no originalitywhatever in this," he says. "This book

is taken bodily from the Old Testament. It is the story of Adam and
Eve all over again. The hero is a mere man! with two arms, two legs,

and a head (so called). Why, it is only Moses's Adam under another
name! And the heroine is nothing but a woman! and she is described as

beautiful, and as having long hair. The author may call her
'Angelina,' or any other name he chooses; but he has evidently,

whether he acknowledges it or not, copied her direct from Eve. The
characters are barefaced plagiarisms from the book of Genesis! Oh! to

find an author with originality!"
One spring I went a walking tour in the country. It was a glorious

spring. Not the sort of spring they give us in these miserable times,
under this shameless government--a mixture of east wind, blizzard,

snow, rain, slush, fog, frost, hail, sleet and thunder-storms--but a
sunny, blue-sky'd, joyous spring, such as we used to have regularly

every year when I was a young man, and things were different.
It was an exceptionally beautiful spring, even for those golden days;

and as I wandered through the waking land, and saw the dawning of the
coming green, and watched the blush upon the hawthorn hedge, deepening

each day beneath the kisses of the sun, and looked up at the proud old
mother trees, dandling their myriad baby buds upon their strong fond

arms, holding them high for the soft west wind to caress as he passed
laughing by, and marked the primrose yellow creep across the carpet of

the woods, and saw the new flush of the field and saw the new light on
the hills, and heard the new-found gladness of the birds, and heard

from copse and farm and meadow the timid callings of the little
new-born things, wondering to find themselves alive, and smelt the

freshness of the earth, and felt the promise in the air, and felt a
strong hand in the wind, my spirit rose within me. Spring had come to

me also, and stirred me with a strange new life, with a strange new
hope I, too, was part of nature, and it was spring! Tender leaves and

blossoms were unfolding from my heart. Bright flowers of love and
gratitude were opening round its roots. I felt new strength in all my

limbs. New blood was pulsing through my veins. Nobler thoughts and
nobler longings were throbbing through my brain.

As I walked, Nature came and talked beside me, and showed me the world
and myself, and the ways of God seemed clearer.

It seemed to me a pity that all the beautiful and precious thoughts
and ideas that were crowding in upon me should be lost to my

fellow-men, and so I pitched my tent at a little cottage, and set to
work to write them down then and there as they came to me.

"It has been complained of me," I said to myself, "that I do not write
literary and high class work--at least, not work that is exceptionally

literary and high-class. This reproach shall be removed. I will
write an article that shall be a classic. I have worked for the

ordinary, every-day reader. It is right that I should do something
now to improve the literature of my beloved country."

And I wrote a grand essay--though I say it who should not, though I
don't see why I shouldn't--all about spring, and the way it made you

feel, and what it made you think. It was simply crowded with elevated
thoughts and high-class ideas and cultured wit, was that essay. There

was only one fault about that essay: it was too brilliant. I wanted
commonplace relief. It would have exhausted the average reader; so

much cleverness would have wearied him.
I wish I could remember some of the beautiful things in that essay,