Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature

Literature, as an English writer remarks, is “not a matter of paper and ink, but a human voice speaking to human beings; a voice, or rather a collection of voices, from generation to generation, speaking to men and women of the present time.” To echo these voices the excursionist must not only follow the trail over beaten tracks, but must ramble through devious by-ways. He must be classed with those who endeavor, as Lord Bacon puts it, “out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, records, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, to save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.” The results of the literary activity of this wonder-working age and the marvels and miracles of the ever-widening field of science are, as Coleridge says, “not in everybody’s reach, and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get more.”