Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

Si

torically, and we are not so speaking. "Bathed in deep silence" is no figure of speech to us: it states a fact. lence is felt by man as a thing vast, voluminous, slowly enwrapping him, clinging, and finally submerging him; not painfully, but pleasantly, peacefully, easefully. It grows and gathers round one quietly like a great mist. Sometimes, when mind or body is not quite sane, not quite whole, there is terror in silence. The sense of sinking in a vast silence is then like drowning, and one cries out to break it, anything to struggle out of the flood that is closing over us. This is a morbid mood; no natural effect of silence. Usually as one feels silence gathering round him, permeating, flowing through him, it is more like the refreshment of sleep or a bath. If this is not a sensation, it is strangely like it. After a full day, perhaps a trying day, sit down absolutely alone in a large room, and listen for the silence.

Gradually

you will feel something stealing over you; the shaken parts of the strained machine will slowly settle in their places, and harmony return. You are absolutely passive. The silence is to you as external as water flowing up around you. If you leave yourself passive long enough, which it is not wise to do, it will possess you, almost Lethe-like. It is the same out of doors: on the downs in the evening or on the water. It is curious too that the spell of silence is not broken by every sound. Some sounds seem almost to add to it: a clock ticking in the large room with no one in it, the single twitter of a bird, the ripple of water, the needles falling in a pine wood. These sounds help us to measure silence, as landmarks do space. Silence is perhaps most felt with the coming of darkness. Α silence that can be felt The Saturday Review

and a darkness that can be felt are kindred phrases; they are more, they are kindred facts; one speaks of a silence of darkness. It is easy to say that it simply means that when it is dark few people are about. That is not enough. Darkness produces much the same feeling that silence does. It enwraps you in the same way. We say naturally the same things of both. It is more than accidental association. Is it a contradiction of this that we also speak of the silence of light? There is a silence of light. His range

The

of feeling must be beggarly who has never felt the silence of light. Has he never stood alone on a broad greensward flooded with slanting sunlight? Or let him stand in a spacious room of some great museum, alone, with the sun pouring in a broad stretch of light. across the uncarpeted oak floor. fine phrase "loca nocte silentia late" might have run as truly "loca luce silentia late.” Darkness and light have an element in common. And so have heat and cold. The silence of cold is proverbial. No one is so dull as not to have felt the intoxicating silence of a great frost. And the silence of heat is hardly less strong. Stand alone in an old garden-you must be alone, of course, for the soul in society cannot feel these things-a walled garden by choice, at the hottest hour of the day. The heat becomes a living thing, and the silence becomes a living thing. You feel them both brooding over the ground; they are presences; they become the only presences. The chirp of a grasshopper or the song of a yellow-hammer almost startles you out of your possession by the silence and the heat. Silence and heat and cold and dark and light and flooding waters have a common soul somehow.

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

To their dainty list of year books devoted to favorite authors, Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. are adding two new volumes, "A Longfellow Calendar," and "A Ruskin Calendar." They will be ready in the early autumn.

Professor Richard T. Ely's "Outlines of Economics," first published in 1903, appears in a new and materially enlarged edition from the press of the Macmillan Co. The author has had the assistance of Professor Thomas S. Adams and Assistant Professor Max O. Lorenz of the University of Wisconsin, and of Professor Allyn A. Young of the Leland Stanford Junior University in the preparation of this edition, and in the process, most of the chapters have been practically rewritten and new ones have been added, but the general plan of the earlier work has been retained.

Lovers of Everyman's Library will be glad to hear of an addition of 23 volumes to the 317 already listed. The new ones are in every respect worthy of their distinguished predecessors, including as they do, among their number Benjamin Franklin's "Autobiog raphy," Gaskell's "Life of Charlotte Bronte," Hazlitt's "Table Talk," Emerson's "Conduct of Life," as well as ten volumes of fiction, Kinglake's "Eothen," Burke's “American Speeches," and other first-rate titles in History and Literature. The general tendency noticeable at the present time in colleges and schools to go back to original texts, instead of using annotated extracts, has caused quite a number of discerning teachers to adopt the titles of this Library as text-books for class

use.

The fourth volume of The Works of James Buchanan, collected and edited

by Mr. John Bassett Moore, and published by the J. B. Lippincott Co., covers the years from 1838 to 1841. The comprehensive plan of this work admits of the inclusion not only of Mr. Buchanan's state papers and speeches but of his private correspondence, in which are embraced some extremely human epistles, reflecting the character of the man and disclosing his passing moods. The state papers and speeches are marked by dignity and deliberation, and to browse through the volumes, whether in the pages devoted to these more formal utterances or those occupied by private letters, is to recall old contentions and struggles and to witness in the making some of the most important periods of American history.

The Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company publish several volumes for young people, in which old favorites are represented, old series of tales are continued, and new ones are begun. Mr. Edward Stratemeyer adds a volume to his Lakeport Series, "The Boat Club Boys of Lakeport," which is a vivid and wholesome portrayal of water sports for boys; Martha James adds a volume, the third, to her Pigeon Camp Series, "The Hero of Pigeon Camp," a stirring story of school-boy experiences in a summer camp; Mrs. Kate E. Carpenter tells "The Story of Frederick the Great for Boys and Girls" with the same engaging simplicity and directness which characterized her earlier "Story of Joan of Arc for Boys and Girls"; Amy Brooks opens a new series of books for small girl readers, the Prue Books, with a volume called "Little Sister Prue," which is prettily told and derives a special advantage from the fact that the author is her own illustrator; and Alice Turner Curtis

opens the Little Heroine Series with "A Little Heroine of Illinois," a story which carries us back to the early days of the Civil War, and describes the rather surprising part which a little girl was enabled to play in stirring times. All of these books are illustrated, and in each case the story is of independent interest, although it introduces characters and scenes that appear in other volumes of the same series.

Mr. Justin Huntley McCarthy's "The Duke's Motto" goes the way of all modern plays and appears as a novel, less artificial in manner than most of its species, but so abounding in petty errors as to suggest a conspiracy of printer, typewriter, and proof reader, with some little assistance from the author. A fair specimen of these errors is the statement that certain bravoes of the reign of Louis Thirteenth did not in 1726 look like soldiers, because they lacked the stiffness of the "levies of the Sun King." Now, Louis Fourteenth was born in 1738. The story begins with the assassination of the Duke de Nevers, friend of Louis Thirteenth, master of a wonderful sword thrust, and using "I am here". as his motto. His infant daughter and the proofs of her legitimacy are given by his wife to Henri Lagardère, a wonderful swordsman, and in due time the girl grows up and has to be restored to her mother, and to the court. Lagardère engages in more fights than one can count, but always for a good reason, and is always a gallant gentleman. In the preface, Mr. McCarthy, dedicating the book to M. Sardou, creator of Lagardère, calls him peer of d'Artagnan and Cyrano and almost peer of Roland and Oliver, and as the champion of Gabrielle de Nevers, La

gardère certainly deserves the praise. Harper & Brothers.

Mr. W. A. B. Coolidge's "The Alps in Nature and History" is, he says, the result of forty years of wandering, and when one considers the enormous number of dates, figures denoting height. depth and distance, the anecdotes and recorded circumstances contained between its covers one is ready to declare that forty years would not suffice to master the book. Fortunately, the reader is not expected to do this but may use or neglect any part as suits his occasions, inasmuch as they are not interdependent. Mr. George Yell's chapter on "Alpine Flowers," Mr. V. Knox's on "Some Beasts and Birds of the Alps," and the author's on "The Alpine Folk" are valuable taken separately. The Western, Central, and Eastern Alps, and their history are individually treated, and the great passes have a chapter to themselves. A surprising number of curious incidents are included in these narratives and many an odd bit of geography is explained. The exploration of the High Alps up to 1865, modern mountaineering, guides, and "A Year's Round" occupy whole chapters, and the divisions and groups of the range are carefully defined and described. In the appendices are lists of the prin cipal peaks and passes, and a list of the peaks in the order in which they were conquered. A list of works relating to the Alps completes the text. The illustrations are carefully described, figures being given as to heights and distances, and good paths being designated, and a map of the entire region is folded into the book which, although it meets the wants of so many classes of readers, is not dear. E. P. Dutton & Co.

A DREAM.

A few days ago I dreamed that I was steering a very gay and elaborate ship upon some narrow water with many people upon its banks, and that there was a figure upon a bed in the middle of the ship. The people were pointing to the figure and questioning, and in my dream I sang verses which faded as I awoke, all but this fragmentary thought, "We call it, it has such dignity of limb, by the sweet name of Death." I have made my poem out of my dream and the sentiment of my dream, and can almost say, as Blake did, "The Authors are in Eternity."

There on the high and painted stern
I held a painted steering oar,
And everywhere that I could turn
Men ran upon the shore.

And though I would have hushed the crowd,

There was no mother's son but said, "What is the figure in a shroud Upon a painted bed?"

And fishes, bubbling to the brim,
Cried out upon that thing beneath,
It had such dignity of limb,
By the sweet name of Death.

Though I'd my finger on my lip, What could I but take up the song? And fish and crowd and painted ship, Cried out the whole night long.

Crying, amid the glittering sea,
Naring it with ecstatic breath,
Because it had such dignity,
By the sweet name of Death.

W. B. Yeats. In the Seven Woods, July 3rd.

The Nation.

IN MY GARDEN.

"Twas there she turned and mocked at

me,

Just by that snow-white lilac tree:
"What did I want with woman's love?
Flowers filled my life all else above."
Ah, when she seemed to scorn me so,
My garden-'twas a Vale of Woe.

This is the rose she threw away-
I plucked it from a damask spray
And bade her wear it for my sake;
Small progress did my wooing make-
She only saw the tiny thorn

By which her little hand was torn.

Towards that small white gate she sped,

The sparrows twittered overhead,
A lark sprang up from out the grass-
I vowed I would not let her pass
Until at least I knew my fate-
Such coquetry was out of date.

A bush of syringa looked down
Upon her forehead's puckered frown,
Then tossed some blossoms in her
hair,-

And she, she let them linger there.
"Cupid is crowning you," I cried,
"The orange flower proclaims the
bride."

Ah, when at length she raised her eyes, My garden-it was Paradise!

Annie G. Hopkins.

The Pall Mall Magazine.

THE MIDDLE MARCHES.

("Posuit fines tuos pacem."-Psalm xlvii.) No Warden keeps the marches

From Tynedale to the Tweed; Broad, winds the road to Scotland Beside the streams of Rede.

Here, where some flaming roof-tree Leaped red-tongued to the sky, About the grass-grown ruins

The nesting rock-doves fly.

Here, where spear-driven cattle

Splashed deep to taste the cool,

Only the quick-winged dipper
Startles the quiet pool.

Unwatched, your flocks, O shepherds,
Feed safe o'er many a field;
With red-brown bracken rusted
Hangs Cheviot's dinted shield.

Plough, husbandman, long furrows,
Fling, sower, undismayed,
In groves of birch and alder
Tweed sheathes his steel-bright

blade.

The Spectator.

« VorigeDoorgaan »