The imagination of youth,--there is no power like it, no machine that can equal it in dynamic force, nothing so full of power, so full of danger. We become that which we look upon, contemplate, remember; it is for this that I dread the ultimate effect of the long, imaginative picturing of our neighbor's sins now presented in our periodicals. Images of evil can hardly help dimming and tarnishing the bright ideals of youth; is there no way--with all our modern wisdom can we find no way--of limiting our exposure of crime to the people who can be of service in helping check it, and keeping it from those who cannot help, but can only be silently hurt? A moment, an hour of some fresh vision, and a child's destiny is perhaps decided for good or for ill. One afternoon's reading of Spenser made the boy Keats a poet; who, knowing the potency of brief experience in the flush of youth, can doubt the lasting wrong wrought again and again by the sudden shock of contact with things evil?
Many images of wrong must of necessity come to the young; let them not be multiplied in our feverish and morbid fashion of to-day. Above all, let them be crowded out by constant suggestion of noble images and noble thought, which will work both consciously and subconsciously, shaping the dream when the dreamer is least aware. To hold up before the ardent and impressionable young that which they may become in strength, in purity, would surely be better than placing before them this perpetual moving-picture show of our civic and national transgressions. I can but believe, as I read article after article of exposure, that this continued presentation to youth of the unholy side of life, with our increasing tendency to make education a mere matter of the intellect and of the eye, is bound to lessen the moral energy of the race. Would it not be better if we were more diligent in searching history, philosophy, literature, for 'whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,' and in bidding the young think on these things?
I write myself; therefore I feel free to say what I please about authors; but if you, sir, or madam, who read, but do not write, were to give voice to the reflections that are even now beginning to distill from my pencil, I should doubtless resent them. And here, indeed, I am faced by the sudden reflection that much of what I say myself I might resent in the mouths of others. This leads to a whole new train of thought, which, however, I refuse to take, and board instead the one I set out for,--The Authors' Unlimited. There are many things to be remarked about authors, but in so short a paper it is possible to touch upon only a very few. One of the first facts that strikes the investigator in this field is that members of my profession do not always appear to endear themselves to those with whom they have dealings.