But are not our poets now all wrong in their insistence that old things can be written about no more and especially in their continual harping on the drab and dreary? What, after all, are the things that really interest u all? Life and death, love and marriage, the inexhaustible beauty of moon and stars, the strange affinities between man and some animals, but not others, and the still stranger fact that every savage beast can be tamed and made a friend of by patience and kindness. These and a hundred other homely subjects will never grow hackneyed, if the poet speaks of them from the heart But this is the age of intellectuality in art. Not the least of the pleasures of Christmas is that it brings us back, if only for a few hours, to the wells of sentiment.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.