SUGGESTIVENESS 211 



ages and ages you have looked out of these same win- 

 dows upon the celestial landscape and the star-deeps. 

 You are at home." " How perverse and pathetic 

 the desires of the animals ! But they all get what 

 they ask for, — long necks and trunks, flapping 

 ears and branching horns and corrugated hides, any- 

 thing, if only they will believe in life and try." ^ 



The intuitional and affirmative writers, to which 

 class our new author belongs, and the most notable 

 example of which, in this country, was Emerson, 

 are, as a rule, more suggestive than the clearly de- 

 monstrating and logical writers. A challenge to the 

 soul seems to mean more than an appeal to the rea- 

 son ; an audacious affirmation often irradiates the 

 mind in a way that a logical sequence of thought 

 does not. Science rarely suggests more than it 

 says ; but in the hands of an imaginative man like 

 Maeterlinck a certain order of facts in natural history 

 becomes fraught with deepest meaning, as may be 

 witnessed in his wonderful " Life of the Bee," — 

 one of the most enchanting and poetic contributions 

 to natural history ever made. Darwin's work upon 

 the earthworm, and upon the cross fertilization of 

 flowers, in the same way seems to convey more 

 truth to the reader than is warranted by the subject. 



The writer who can touch the imagination has 

 the key, at least one key, to suggestiveness. This 

 power often goes with a certain vagueness and in- 

 definiteness, as in the oft-quoted lines from one of 

 Shakespeare's sonnets : — 



1 The Religion of Democracy. By Charles Ferguson. 



