"Writing is simply another form of living," came back the answer swiftly. "The closer you can hitch your writing to your living, and the more of your work—and your family

- you can pile in, the better. The best writing comes out of whatever work you are doing, even correcting papers."

"Aren't teachers, - English teachers especially using up their creative energy in their work, so that they have none left for writing?"

"Certainly not. I would not employ an English teacher who did not write. He must know from his own experience what he is asking others to do. Criticism of English papers, raised to a higher power, is real creative work. This whole matter of combining a job with writing is just a question of how badly you want to write. If only you want to enough, everything becomes grist and is used.

"Anybody can write," Professor Sharp insisted earnestly, "doctor, lawyer, professor, business man, -if he has it in him; the kind of job does not matter, Newspaper work is helpful for a year or two, but after that it is dangerous. A job in a publishing house is the very worst kind for any one who wants to write, for there, as Thoreau said of a library, (though perhaps not in these words), 'Books are made, but not written.'

"Speaking of the making of books, haven't you a rule for getting a book to write itself?” "Perhaps you mean, 'A paragraph a day: an essay a month: a book - sometime.'"

"Is that the way you wrote so many books while you were teaching?"

Daphne answered this question.

"I never had time to do any writing myself," she smiled, "because I was too busy keeping him writing!"

If only there were Daphnes enough to go round!

"Next?" queried Professor Sharp.

for essays large enough to make it worth cultivating?"

Professor Sharp sprang for an Atlantic.

"The market is much greater than for the short story, if only writers would recognize the fact. Take this number of the Atlantic, for instance. What is the proportion of short stories to articles? Two to fifteen, roughly speaking. Look at the range of articles — articles are essays, of course. In this one number are examples of a dozen types of essays: historical, travel, nature, fanciful, factual, financial, political, and so on. If only we can stop thinking of the 'familiar essay' as the only kind, we shall greatly enlarge the usefulness of the form, which is really unlimited. Don't you remember that only a short time ago the editor of Harper's begged writers to stop sending him short stories he could not use and to begin writing essays and articles of which he received far too few? Not only are the general magazines eager for essays, but many newspapers will take the personal type. There you must write less for money than for personal satisfaction, but if the little essays become popular, there is always the probability that a publisher will want to gather them into book form."

"Can you suggest any books that would be helpful to any one who took your advice and tried an essay?"

"I know of nothing better than William Tanner's two volumes, 'Essays and Essay Writing' and 'Familiar Essays.'"

The friend who had brought me to Bread Loaf and the Sharps was looking at me reproachfully. Was I going to abuse her kindness and the patience of these dear people too long? I gathered my papers together regretfully.

"I am amazed," mused Professor Sharp, not noticing my movement, "at the writing and publishing which is going on all over the country. Everywhere I go on my lecturing trips, I find writing and literary clubs which are producing in greater and richer quantities than ever before. This old world has got to

"Well you have made your literary success in the essay form, but isn't the field limited for most writers? Is there a market

be rewritten every night to meet the demands of constantly increasing readers and new periodicals."

Out again in the crisp mountain air under a starry sky with more sky and more stars than I had dreamed existed my friend and I marveled together at the enthusiasm for the profession of writing and the people who

O

NE evening not long ago, when I was reading and cutting pages in the Laurie edition of Yeats' autobiography of his youth, I was reminded often by the music of his speech that a poet had written the book. And I would sometimes stop, thinking of it, and turn back to the frontispiece reproduction of Shannon's portrait of him, to look again at the young man, the friend of Henley and Moore, of Todhunter, Wilde, and Shaw, who out of the Beardsley period was reliving his life before me. He was a poet, I saw in great evidence; the same who went daily from Bidford Park to the British Museum to ferret out the list of Irish prose for his English and American anthologies, and who paused one afternoon in Fleet Street to watch the play of a small fountain in which he found the inspiration for "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." I count him a noble figure as he sits there with the straightness of a reed. I look at the hands folded in his lap, at the clear quality of intellect written into his thin, sensitive face, at the dark clothes and flowing tie, at the loose strands of his thick hair blown across the forehead, at the bay leaf lying on the table in front of him, and see in them each the documents of his poetic temper.

says about it in his preface: "I have found in an old diary a quotation from Stéphane Mallarmé, saying that his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple. As those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this book, I have chosen 'The Trembling of the Veil' for its title." Somebody remarked to me once, in speaking of it as a phrase: "That sounds just like Yeats." And so it does. "The Cloths of Heaven," "The Wandering of Usheen," "The Wild Swans at Coole," "In the Seven Woods," "The Shadowy Waters," "These are the Clouds," "The Collar-bone of a Hare," "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time," have all about them the significance of the individual. Even in "The Tower," his latest book of poems, Yeats is not only still playing with his earlier symbolism, but doing it often in the prophetic, low-rhythmed voice of his youth, when such phrases of pattern came easily from his pen.

But that is beside the point. I was coming at the truth that even in his simplest titles, as in the Shannon portrait, one can see the calibre of Yeats. I began then to wonder how much this is true of other writers. I find it hard to say. Shakespeare had it, and Milton; Jane Austen, Dickens, Poe, Kipling, and Mark Twain. But certainly the gift of titles

And sometimes, as I was reading, I would turn again to the title and recall what Yeats

is not every man's. Indeed, I have frequently pondered how many who can honestly write are so careless or indifferent, or lacking in poetic sense, as to clap upon their work the invention of an unimaginative moment. Titles which in themselves would bring the reader to the book are rare enough in our literature. Yet when they come, streaked with the divine rust, there is no mistaking. Books and poems and stories have lived in spite of names; but those with great ones, are hitched to them as a wagon to a star. Of these I made a count among the number that came to my mind. The total was not large, yet it seemed to me a calendar of imagination, and I considered it with interest, thinking of some lines in Humbert Wolfe:

Thus we'll count over together
the list of all beautiful things-
but I'll keep my grey goose feather
for the day when you're tired of kings.

I felt that any one would discern in the least
of these a charm which is beyond analysis.
I laid them together as they occurred: The
Anatomy of Melancholy, The Voyage of the
Beagle, Nightmare Abbey, Gulliver's Travels,
The Hill of Dreams, The Wind in the Wil-
lows, Over the Brazier, The Brushwood Boy,
The Forsyte Saga, The Way of all Flesh, The
Return of the Native, Where the Pavement
Ends, The Master of Ballantrae, The Fall of
the House of Usher, Gallions Reach, Kim,
The Wizard of Oz, Papers from Lilliput, The
Man Against the Sky, Dreamthorp, Sirenica,
Lord Jim, The Stones of Venice, Prester John,
Dracula, The Seats of the Mighty, Samson
Agonistes, The Ring and the Book, The Bab
Ballads, Vanity Fair, A Tale of Two Cities,
Nicholas Nickleby, Enoch Soames, The Daf-
fodil Fields, Limehouse Nights, Peacock Pie,
The Lady of Shalott, Marmion, Wake Robin,
Green Mansions, Ivanhoe, Weir of Hermiston,
Puck of Pook's Hill, Far Away and Long
Ago, The Romany Stain, The Constant
Nymph, Burning Daylight, The Plough and
the Stars, The Time of Man, The Playboy
of the Western World, The Golden Age,

Ebony and Ivory, The Deserted Village, Lavengro, Fairies and Fusiliers, The Drums of the Fore and Aft, Rootabaga Pigeons, The Candle of Vision, Lolly Willowes, The Way of the World, Mountain Interval, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, Dreams and Journeys, An Inland Voyage, The Crock of Gold, The Road to Xanadu, Huckleberry Finn, The Holiday Round, Rest and Unrest, Moby Dick, Tales of Mean Streets, Southwind, A Window in Thrums.

The writer who has a grain of such quality in his own name is favored of the gods. I think first of Rudyard Kipling. Surely, of all names, that is the most romantic. Strong, exotic, symmetrical, easy in print with its balance of long letters above and below the line, words like a leech in the memory, when was a better combination designed? I say never, and none of these which follow are quite of that gallant coinage, though the sound of them is often sonorous and fine. I should mention Chaucer, Keats, Milton, Hakluyt, Tennyson, Swinburne, Marco Polo, Shelvocke, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Congreve, John Skelton, Matthew Arnold, Bret Harte, Defoe, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad, Eleanor Farjeon, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, John Galsworthy, Emily Dickinson, Walter Pater, Hilaire Belloc, Padraic Colum, Arthur Machen, James Joyce, Llewelyn Powys, Raphael Pumpelly, Walter de la Mare, Edgar Allan Poe, Christopher Morley, O. Henry, Havelock Ellis, Vachel Lindsay, Warwick Deeping, Stevenson, Gilbert and Sullivan, Christina Rossetti, Rider Haggard, Jack London, Anthony Trollope, George Borrow, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

If the catalogue of English names were pursued to the end, it would probably be discovered that the finest belong to men who have never written. Conversely, it would be interesting to know how many writers chose their profession because their names compelled them. From the average quality of our books, I should surmise a great many. But a good name is no guarantee of the product. If it were, there would be some truth under

lying the uniform edition of the works of So-and-so. And if a great Scotsman had chosen to write, we should have been swept

to his books by the very sound of him: Colonel, the Honorable, the McIntosh of McIntosh, Lord-Lieutenant of Inverness-shire.

HE New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, New York City, offers services of which even the out-of-town writer can avail himself. First, there are printed catalogues of notable collections, some of them free and others sold at cost, which are useful to writers, and subject bibliographies, published in the Bulletin of the library, which will keep the writer informed of books published on a particular subject.

But more important and perhaps more generally useful is the photostat service which was installed in December, 1912. Through it one may get readable copies of printed matter, and glossy prints of any book page, picture, or object in the library collections.

Consider the advantages of an absolutely accurate copy of a printed page in reference work. If the reference library you use does not possess the paper, book, or picture you need, perhaps the New York Public Library does own it. Through catalogues and bibliographies, or through correspondence, the book may be located and a photostat reproduction of the needed pages or paragraphs can be ordered by mail.

According to the Photostat Department of the Forty-second Street library, orders come constantly from writers, critics, editors, journalists (especially feature writers), scholars, university professors, and graduate students who want pages or pictures from certain books, periodicals, and newspapers.

Artists, designers, actors, stage managers, moving-picture producers, and advertising men ask for reproductions of pictures. Editors frequently make requests for pictures of people who are suddenly featured in the news.

For those who desire pictures there is an aparently infinite variety in the library's picture collection, which is made up of thousands of pictures collected from every possible source, from old magazines and discarded books, print collections and advertisements, booklets and leaflets of varying value. The pictures are catalogued according to subject, and the list of cross references is complete. If, for instance, a writer is uncertain about the costumes of a definite period, this collection can give him a picture of what he wants. The costume pictures are subdivided according to country and again according to rank. One can find the dandy of New York's early '80's or a slave girl of Cleopatra's court, a minstrel of King Arthur's day or a bride of the Victorian Court. But period costume is only one of the many complete subjects catalogued. A photostat reproduction of any picture in the collection can be purchased for a small sum.

Perhaps a school teacher may want to illustrate her lessons on foreign countries and customs; a newspaper article to be salable may need the picture of a place or building; a biographical sketch is not complete without a picture of the subject; a technical article needs a map or a diagram found only in a valuable old book; a popular article on furniture, printing, floral culture, and other subjects would be more readily salable if illustrated; at such times the photostat service of the library becomes often the least expensive source of supply.

A photostat is a specially constructed copying camera which makes the photographic reproduction directly on sensitized paper. Ac

"A roll of paper is fastened in a magazine at the back of the camera box and is unrolled as needed. The sheets, cut off in the proper length, are dropped into the developing box as fast as the exposures are made. Books, prints, or objects to be copied are placed under glass on an adjustable frame, which may be raised or lowered if enlargement or reduction of the original is desired. A negative print (white on black) is produced by photographing the original page. The position of type or figures, corrected by a prism attached to the lens of the camera, appears as in the original and not reversed as on a plate negative.

"If a positive print (a facsimile with black letters on a white ground) is desired, the negative, when developed, is placed on the frame and photographed again. Each additional positive copy of a print is obtained by repeating this process of photographing the negative, and not, as in the case of a glass negative, printing from it. The prints may be developed in the developing box or more conveniently in the dark room. When washed, the prints are run through the drying machine a wide belt of canvas which passes over rollers and around an electrically heated drum."

But the service involves more than a machine, a dark room, and an operator. Photographing and developing are only part of the job. For readers, the service has headquarters near the delivery desk of the main reading room with a reference librarian, a clerical assistant, and a messenger in charge.

Correspondence from out-of-town users is handled directly through the director's office.

and a knowledge of library methods, bibliographies, and reference books is kept busy. Some orders are very vague; others require special research. Naturally it is advisable to be as specific as possible in ordering a photostat to save time, misunderstanding, and expense. Often a preliminary correspondence with the photostat department is advisable, as payment must be made when the order is given.

The present rates, subject to change, are: Bromide paper (dull, mat finish)

112x14in. 14x18in.