vivacity; and both have tears as well as smiles at command. But, clever as Josephine Dodge Daskam's work is, in the rare quality of simplicity George Madden Martin's surpasses it. Her "Emmy Lou" won the hearts of hundreds of readers, at her first appearance in "McClure's Magazine", two years ago a little First Reader girl then-and she has grown more and more dear and real as she has climbed from grade to grade with her valentines and spelling-matches and licorice-sticks and free-hand drawing, till now she has reached the High School and learned that she is pretty. The volume in which the ten charming sketches are collected will be welcomed with the warmth of genuine personal affection. The illustrator, Charles Louis Hinton, has been remarkably successful in catching childish poses and expressions.

Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson's sketch of John Greenleaf Whittier in the English Men of Letters series of the Macmillans will not displace Mr. Pickard's more elaborate biography, but its modest proportions as well as the grace of its style make it easy reading. The element of personal acquaintance enters into this, as well as into Col. Higginson's recently published volume on Longfellow in the series of American Men of Letters. He knew Whittier well, as man, poet and reformer, and is as well qualified as any one now living to depict him adequately in all three relations. The book is a welcome addition to a singularly attractive series.

There is a virility and a wholesomeness of tone in Dr. James M. Ludlow's group of essays on "Incentives for Life" which makes one mourn that the book is least likely to be read by those who need it most. Dr. Ludlow regards degeneration of manhood as the most serious peril to society, and an un

trained will as the secret of degeneracy. In this volume he treats of weakness of will as a diseased condition, and considers at length and in a cogent style, abounding with illustrations, the incentives for life which accompany a good conscience; and the various substitutes for conscience, such as apparent expediency, other people's consciences, conventional morality and the rest. The temper of the book is excellent, and the keenness and vivacity of the style save it from being dull. Fleming H. Revell Co.

In glittering blue-and-gold, recalling the delights of the first "Fairy Book," comes "The Book of Romance," edited by Andrew Lang, with some fifty fullpage illustrations by H. G. Ford of "Fairy Book" fame, and eight colored plates for a crowning joy. Gracefully linking the new volume to its predecessors by remarking that "romances are only fairy tales grown up," Mr. Lang prefaces with a few pages of explanatory notes the stories which Mrs. Lang paraphrases in simple, pleasant prose. The Round Table legends fill about a third of the volume: the remaining two hundred and fifty pages is divided among Roland, Diarmid, Robin Hood, William Shortnose, Wayland the Smith and Grittir the Strong. The boys and girls will be sure to call for Green and Red and Yellow "ROmance Books" to follow. Longmans, Green & Co.

The latest "American invasion" reported from London is that of an unnamed American who bore away in triumph from a recent sale a unique collection of books comprising seven hundred lots. The collection embraced thirty-two examples of Caxton's press, mostly from William Morris's library, and three books issued by the Oxford press in the fifteenth century. The first Oxford book was the "Tyrannius

Rufinus," the earliest of all (1468 for 1478) issued from the press. The second book was the editio princeps et unica of the "Latin Commentary on the Lamentations of Jeremiah," made by John Lothbury (1482), with wood cut border. The third was the "Explanationes notabiles denotissimi" of Richard Rolle of Hampole (1483), said to be the only one of four copies not in a public library, and the price paid for the last named volume at the Inglis sale in 1900 was £300.

Characteristic of the religious thought of the day is a class of books which, waiving the discussion of theological problems, aim to concentrate the attention of the candid readers on the plain, ethical teaching of the Founder of Christianity and on the answer which it makes to human nature's needs. Noticeable among such books is "Jesus' Way," by President Hyde of Bowdoin College, in which are grouped, under such headings as "Faith: The Grasp of the Way," "Love: The Law of the Way," and "Blessedness: The Reward of the Way," two hundred or more passages from the Synoptic Gospels. The writer's comment is clear, fresh, stimulating, and admirably adapted for the purpose he has in view. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

In "The Reflections of Ambrosine," Elinor Glyn, author of "The Visits of Elizabeth," sketches the career of a beautiful but portionless young girl, of mingled French and English parentage, trained by her French grandmother according to old-school standards of manners and conduct, driven by the grandmother's suddenly impending death to a martage de convenance with a vulgar Englishman of newly-made wealth, and meeting too late the kinsman of taste and breeding

like her own for whom her guardian's original plan had destined her. The society on which Ambrosine reflects, in her journal, is incredibly sordid and base, but her "reflections" are clever enough. Harper & Bros.

Writing in his eightieth year, with a mind richly stored with the fruits of observation and experience, but with a spirit eternally young and buoyant, Edward Everett Hale has recorded his "Memories of a Hundred Years", which the Macmillan Co. publish in two attractive and profusely illustrated volumes. It is briefly the story of the nineteenth century in the United States which is here told, with a vivacity, a piquancy, a genius for seizing upon salient facts and putting them in the fewest words rarely equalled. Dr. Hale's own recollections extend over at least seven decades of the century and are supplemented by those of his father, and by family papers, for the earlier period, so that the personal element is strong throughout. Dr. Hale's Americanism is as robust at eighty as it could have been at twenty, and he unfolds the panorama of the national development, depicts the great events and the great men who shaped them, and fills in details of social, industrial, and literary progress with an unflagging interest which his readers will discover to be contagious. Doubtless a more orderly history might have been written, if Dr. Hale had been concerned with so grave a matter as the orderly writing of history, but it would scarcely have been as entertaining. His very asides, his bits of personal opinion, his abrupt changes from the past to the present, and the flavor of humor which gives piquancy to the whole add to the charm of the volumes. A fine photogravure portrait of the author looks out at the reader from the frontispiece.

LINES WRITTEN IN LONDON.

Yet not for thee her coming, nor for: thee the April gleam:

for thee!

By the old track I mean

And if you meet me on the way

No ghost will you have seen.

For here it is my ghost does flit,
While, from these shadows far,
On heathered hills with sunbeams lit
I am where now you are.

Ella Fuller Maitland.

The Spectator. WHO IS SHE THAT COMETH?

Who is she that cometh from the waters of the west?

Who is she that cometh from the land beyond the sea

With eyes of waking spring-tide, full of April's bright unrest? Wandering winds and waters, tell me, who is she?

Who is she that cometh with the wind

about her blown,

Restless raiment gleaming full of colors of the sea,

Green as under-curve of wave, white as waters overthrown, Wandering winds and waters, tell me, who is she?

Who is she that cometh with the dawn

upon her brow,

Dawn of April moving with white footsteps o'er the sea

To light the land with glory of green branch and leafy bough? Wandering winds and waters, tell me, who is she?

Who is she that cometh all among the bannered throng

Triumph of bright banners o'er the sand dunes by the sea

Who is she that wakens my wild harp to wondering song?

Wandering winds and waters, tell me, who is she?

O my heart! she cometh-she whom thou hast seen in dream

In lonely moonlight wandering by shimmering gray sea,

Wilfrid W. Gibson.

THE FISHERMAN'S SONG..

I'm sittin' in my li'll boat;

The lines is to the stern; And all my thoughts are full of 'ee Whichever way I turn.

If you was this here li'll boat
And I was but the sea,
Aw, my dear life, I tell 'ee, though,
It should be fine for thee.

My curling waves around the keel

Should dance with happy light; I'd bear 'ee past the sunken rocks And bring 'ee home all right.

I'm sittin' in my li'll boat;

The gulls is in the sky;
Aw, dear, if I was one of they,
I knaw which way I'd fly.

Mark Guy Pearse..

THE GATE OF HEAVEN.

Whither leads the gateway
That stands at the top of the hill,
With bars against the sky?
A child, I dreamed thereby
To enter Heaven straightway.
I am old, but I know still

That the edge of the world is there, -
And beyond is Paradise,
The land that is more fair
Than the wisdom of the wise.

I know it; for did I climb
In my beggar-clouts of sin,

And gross with this world's grime,
I could not enter in,

Though I waited times and a time.
Nor sight of glory nor sound

Of rapture should reach me there;
Only the common ground,
Only the old despair.

F. W. Bourdillon...

SEVENTH SERIES VOLUME XVII.

FROM BEGINNING Vol. CCXXXV.

At the opening of the present year there were still alive amongst us two men who survived as representatives of what poetry was in these islands before the commencement of the Victorian era. Both have left us-Mr. Aubrey de Vere, having reached his eighty-ninth year, passed away on the 20th of January; Mr. Philip James Bailey, in his eighty-seventh, on the 7th of September. So, as we sit quietly and watch, we see history unrolling, since, in the chronicle of our literature, the closure of a great and complicated system of poetic activity is, in a sense, defined by the deaths of these venerable men. Moreover-and this is curious-in each of these survivors we had, living before us, types-not quite of the first order, indeed, but yet vivid types -of the two main divisions of the English poetry of the first half of the nineteenth century. That, namely, which was devoted to a reasonable grace, and that which was uplifted on a mystical enthusiasm. So that a sermon on the verse of that time might well take as its text the opposed and yet related names of De Vere and Bailey.

Nothing so extensive is to be attempted here. But before endeavoring to define the character of the talent of the younger of these veterans, and to note the place of Festus in the history

of letters, we may linger a moment on what resemblance there was betweeir the two aged men, so intensely opposed in their general disposition of mind and their walk in the world. They had in common an exquisite personal dignity, Mr. de Vere moving both in Ireland and in London in the genial companionship of like-minded friends, Mr. Bailey stationary in his cloister or hermitage at Nottingham. They had in common the happy fate which preserved to each in extreme old age all the faculties of the mind, the sweetest cheerfulness, the most ardent hopefulness, an optimism that nothing could assail and that disease itself avoided. Each, above all, to a very remarkable degree, preserved to the last his religious devotion to that art to which his life had been dedicated, each to the very end was full of a passionate love of verse. Song-intoxicated men they were, both of them; retaining their delight in poetry far beyond the common limits of an exhilaration in any mental matter.

When this has been said, it is the difference far more than the resemblance between them which must strike the memory. Of the imaginative opposition which the author of Festus offered to the entire school of which Mr. de Vere was a secondary ornament,

more will be said later. But the physical opposition was immense, between the slightness of figure and flexible elegance of the Irish poet, with his mundane mobility, and the stateliness of Mr. Bailey. Mr. de Vere never seemed to be an old man, but a young man dried up; Mr. Bailey, of whose appearance my recollections go back at least five-and-twenty years, always during that time looked robustly aged, a sort of prophet or bard, with a cloud of voluminous white hair and curled silver beard. As the years went by, his head seemed merely to grow more handsome, almost absurdly, almost irritatingly so, like a picture of Connal, "first of mortal men," in some illustrated edition of Ossian. The extraordinary suspension of his gaze, his gentle, dazzling aspect of uninterrupted meditation combined with a curious downward arching of the lips, seen through the white rivers of his beard, gave a distinctly vatic impression. He had an attitude of arrested inspiration, as if waiting for the heavenly spark to fall again, as it had descended from 1836 to 1839, and as it seemed never inclined to descend again. But the beauty of Mr. Bailey's presence, which was so marked as to be an element that cannot be overlooked in a survey of what he was, had an imperfection in its very perfectness. It lacked fire. What the faces of Milton and Keats possessed, what we remember in the extraordinary features of Tennyson, this was just missing in Mr. Bailey, who, nevertheless, might have sat to any painter in Christendom as the type of a Poet.

I.

English literature in the reign of William IV. is a subject which has hitherto failed to attract a historian. It forms a small belt or streak of the most colorless, drawn across our va

riegated intellectual chronicle. The romantic movement of the end of the preceding century had gradually faded into emotional apathy by 1830, and the years which England spent under the most undignified and inefficient of her monarchs were few indeed, but highly prosaic. Most of the mental energy of the time went out in a constitutional struggle which was necessary, but was not splendid. A man is hardly at his best when his own street-door has been slammed in his face, and he stands outside stamping his feet and pulling the bell. The decade which preceded the accession of Victoria was, in literature, a period of cold reason: the best that could be said of the popular authors was that they were sensible. A curious complacency marked the age, a self-sufficiency which expressed itself in extraordinary unemotional writing. To appreciate the heavy and verbose deadness of average English prose in the thirties, we must dip into the books then popular. No volume of the essay class was so much in vogue as the Lacon of the Rev. Mr. Colton, a work the aridity of which can only be comprehended by those who at this date have the courage to attack it. Mr. Colton, although he preached the loftiest morality, was a gambling parson, and shot himself, in 1832, in the forest of Fontainebleau. But that did not affect the popularity of his chain of dusty apophthegms.

The starvation of the higher faculties of the mind in the William IV. period was something which we fail to-day to realize. No wonder Carlyle thought, in 1835, that "Providence warns me to have done with literature," and in 1837 saw nothing for it but to "buy a rifle and a spade, and withdraw to the Transatlantic wilderness." In the letters of Tennyson we may easily read what it was that, after the failure of his enchanting volumes of 1830 and 1833, kept him silent in despair for ten