Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

DANA AND HIS PEOPLE 227
a most prepossessing thinker and talker, had recently
published his "Progress and Poverty" and had come from
California to New York to live. He was speaking of exaggeration in what is nowadays termed propaganda; the
elevation of aim well above the mark in order that the
arrow or bullet may not strike below it. John Swinton
manifested great interest in this discussion of the legitimacy of artistic emphasis.
I told a story I had read-it may have been in Samuel
Rogers's "Table Talk," and it may have been elsewhere —
about a British poet who took a visiting friend to ride
around the neighboring country and paused on a hillside
overlooking a lovely vale in the centre of which was the
spire of a little church standing in its tree-embowered
churchyard.
"How beautiful!" exclaimed the visitor. "The scene
would be nothing without that ideal church and graveyard."
"Yes," said the poet, the tears coming into his eyes,
"and how much more beautiful to me because I know that
in that churchyard are buried my grandfather, my mother,
and two dear sisters."
The stranger afterward told of the incident and the
impression it made on him to somebody well acquainted
with the region and the poet who wept on the hillside.
"Nonsense," said the other, "He was lying to you. Not
one of his family is there. They are all buried over in
Sussex."
"The poet was not lying," said Swinton with great animation. "It was necessary for the sentiment of the occa

sion that his grandfather and his mother and sisters should
be buried there. He was right to put them there."
Henry George smiled but made no comment.