sovereignty. From one end of the country to the other, from every Indian hearth and home, from temple and mosque and church, the voice of sympathy in the great sorrow that has overwhelmed it will be heard appealing to the Giver of all Good to lessen the weight of the heavy burden.

To the widowed Queen of spotless virtue, the people of India will offer their silent and respectful homage of tears. King Edward has a monument in the gratitude of countless millions of the human race. India will raise a visi

The Hindustan Review.

ble memorial which will combine all races and creeds in recognition of the beneficence of a great reign. The gen

ius of Lord Curzon planned the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, though circumstances have delayed the realization of the great idea. I have no doubt that the love and loyalty of the vast population of India, of all nationalities, will devise a monument worthy of the greatest of the world's potentates and of the traditions of a grateful people, in honor of King-Emperor Edward VII.

Mr. William Allen White's "The Old Order Changeth" concerns itself with the economic, political and legal changes and reforms which have taken place all over the country during the last century in general and especially during the last twenty-five years. The volume is composed of nine papers, two on the general history of the democracy, as a democracy; two on changes and tendencies; one on municipal progress; three on the chief determinative influences, the civil service league, the schools and the courts, and last of all "A Look Ahead." The Macmillan Co.

When one looks upon the enormous mass of common-sense recently presented to American readers in the guise of books on eschatology, one is amazed to see how great is the multitude yet seeking after a sign and declaring that no existing form of Christianity is as "broad," as "liberal," as "expansive," as "progressive," as the human nature manifested in their individual selves. Now from Christ Church Rectory, Andover comes the Rev. Frederic Palmer's "The Winning of Immortality," of which the kernel is that im

mortality belongs only to those who are willing to earn it and to keep it by obedience to the law under which it is granted. This theory disposes of the favorite difficulty of self styled sensitive souls, the impossibility of being happy forever while others are miserable forever, and in the course of his argument the author leaves other discomforted folk behind him. He has the pleasant gift of gentle satire and an excellent style, apparently wrought out by a mind full fed at Scriptural sources, and at the fountains of good English literature. Readers to whom time seems very precious will find that the last eight chapters contain the author's answers to the question "Are you Immortal?" Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.

Those who have read Miss Lagerlof's work with admiration from the first moment of its introduction to American readers are inclined to wax ironical over the meek obedience with which hundreds of the unconscious and indifferent have been transformed into admirers since she received the Nobel prize. It seems probable that they may smile even more broadly for her new volume, "The Girl from the

Marshcroft" bids fair to be more widely read than her novels, although it is only a collection of detached stories. They are told with exquisite art, and they are of varied species disclosing almost as many sides of the artist's mind as there are separate tales. They are followed by a frank and valuable bit of autobiography telling of the years of waiting and of hard work by which "The Story of Gosta Berling" was achieved. The stories are less carefully translated than the first two volumes of the author's work and the translator introduces some unnecessary colloquialisms, but such faults are easily corrected. The tales themselves, whether pathetic, moral or fanciful are remarkable. That which gives its name to the volume presents a novel legal case and its thesis will be judged in widely different ways, but it is excellently presented. Little Brown & Co.

Miss Anne Douglas Sedgwick's "Franklin Winslow Kane" is a remarkably fine specimen of the analytic novel, and therefore one can but hope that her next will be of a type of her own evolving, and not cast in a mould originating with Mr. Henry James. It is true that Mr. James, parenthesis excepted, is a most delectable writer, able, conscientious and highly endowed with the artistic quality, but a single specimen of him suffices for a generation. Miss Sedgwick's story has four personages. An American millionaire, a Barnes Newcome in appearance, the fine flower of chivalrous virtue in character; an American woman whose hand he has sought for years; a poor gentle woman of British birth, a perennial visitor among fortunate friends or in the house of an aunt; and a handsome, agreeable, idle English youth of the sort tolerated and encouraged in Great Britain during his search for a wife able to support him, and energetically

This

despised in the United States. second pair of compatriots, perfectly understanding their position, permit themselves an intimate friendship, and this is the position of the four when Miss Sedgwick brings the two women together in a foreign land. Her manipulation reveals the intimate jewels of their souls and also their intimate defects, and as they pass and repass and change position, each time explaining all their motives, small and great, the skill with which they are managed seems more and more admirable. Mr. James himself could not surpass the skilfulness of Miss Sedgwick's treatment of these manoeuvres, but she appears to greater advantage in the stories in which she introduces more sharply differentiated personages, and incidents of greater moment and less. deliberate in procession. The story assumes a more agreeable aspect on a second reading, but does not quite attain the standard set by "A Fountain Sealed." The Century Company.

The title chosen by L. M. Montgomery for her third novel, "Kilmeny of the Orchard," would make friends for it wheresoever Scottish verse is loved, but it will win favor for itself wheresoever it is read. Kilmeny is a dumb girl, beautiful exceedingly but growing up in the belief inculcated by her mother that she is very ugly. She is a self-taught violinist of rare genius, and the young school-master who hears and sees her as she is playing in the orchard loses his heart at once. He happens to be not only a school-master, but a modern version of the fairy prince, being the clever son of a rich man, upright, well-bred and handsome, and his love story moves swiftly and smoothly to its end. The minor personages, the quaint dwellers on the adjacent farms, all represent well-defined but not overdrawn rustic types with a background of Scottish virtue for their

inheritance. The scene is Prince Edward's Island of which the inhabitants are said to speak as "the Island," asking "What other island is there?" when requested to be more definite. As Miss Montgomery describes it, it is lovely enough, on Wordsworthian theory, to account for Kilmeny's beauty and for her music. The tale is an idyll with all its unhappiness," an auld sang" and its actual events forming a pleasant succession with a glimpse at the end of the happiest of coming lives for Kilmeny and the master. How can the husband of a dumb wife expect happiness? There be those who could see something reasonable in the prospect, but Miss Montgomery's solution of the question is not cynical, but as romantic as it should be to harmonize with Kilmeny's lovely face and nature. L. C. Page & Co.

The stories in Miss Myra Kelly's "Little Aliens," tales of alien and native Hebrew and Irish pupils and a preternaturally patient and kind teacher, are as amusing and as truthful as those in her earlier volumes of school-tales, but as she exhausts her material she is forced to use the less agreeable elements, and as one reads her now, doubts arise as to the wisdom of her pedagogy. Spencer may or may not be a satisfactory writer on education, but Spencer with every second link in his processes removed or distorted, by no means offers an attractive plan to a teacher of any school, ancient or modern. Also "mere mechanical memory," despised by those who teach reading by sentences before a child knows a letter, and "awaken the judgment" before a child has any accumulated experience, or any instruction in principles whereby to judge, is a possession of which their pupils learn the value after they have failed in various positions because their minds are mere sieves. If this sort of wisdom were offered to

The "Author of The Inner Shrine" resolutely refuses to accept any of the names obligingly offered for his or her choice, and appears by that style, and that alone on the title page of "The Wild Olive." The problem which he who runs may read in the book is that of the man once held within the grasp of the law, howsoever unjustly, and the organized morality of the world. Written beneath it, in far smaller characters, is the old question as to whether or not, with no question of religion concerned, a Vow of betrothal must be kept when, the love on which it was based departs. More original than either of these, is the story of the way by which the adjudged criminal built himself a new reputation, among strangers, and of the unique relation which the heroine constructed between herself and him, and on these two unusual phases the success of the novel depends. The author has made this somewhat doubtful, for the very last paragraph must be read before one is quite certain of the ending, aud even then the careful-minded will yearn for a brief knitting of loose ends, and knotting of ravelled threads. The average reader detests this species of treatment in a love story; he thinks that it should be reserved for tales of

Pinkerton yard and the Scotland Police or whatsoever it may be that they call the fellows, you know. Besides, the heroine does not, like the heroine of "The Inner Shrine," revel in the lilies and languors of life, and is the less attractive on that account. By way of compensation, those who love not their fellow women will find her contrasted with three personages to whose cackle only the phrase of Mr. F.'s aunt can do justice, and it is to one of these that the hero presents his heart. Such is the fortune of the Wild Olive of this world! Harper & Brothers.

The publication of a volume of poems by Alfred Noyes would be an important literary event, even if the recent deaths among his seniors had not placed him among the first four English poets now living, a distinction all the greater because he is the youngest among them. Fortunately his work has not thus far arrived at that height of popular favor at which it is attacked and carefully belittled by those who fear its political, or moral, or economical influence, and he is spared the obloquy heaped on Mr. Kipling, and even more than Mr. Henry Newbolt is left to be read by the better classes, and to be quoted and criticized by the better newspapers and magazines. Fortunately, one says, for such personal attacks as have now become customary in England are unwholesome treatment for a poet even if he be no Keats in sensitiveness, and Mr. Noyes although he has written some criticism and some critical biography is above all a poet. His mysticism, his vision of history, his version of the spell of the East are worked out in terms of poetry, not in prose as with Mr. Kipling and Mr. Newbolt, and in poetry susceptible to attack by that species of clever burlesque which so wounded

Lanier, whom he resembles in his feeling for difficult, intricate involution and delicate assonance. Also, although no socialist, he has something of the spirit of discontent with his time, and finds its strife and discord so repulsive that Lucifer scorns them; and he has an immense tenderness for the great dumb army marching steadily row on row, individually indistinguishable but steadily marching, and here he stands apart from Mr. Kipling and Mr. Newbolt to whom the toiler, the soldier, the man in the street are of the same stuff as the generals, the kings, the poets of the earth. In the three elegies in his latest book, "The Enchanted Island," Meredith's, Swinburne's and Francis Thompson's, one finds joyous reverence for Meredith, admiration for Swinburne's art rather than for Swinburne and for Thompson the awe-stricken pity which waits on the mystery of pain. In the brilliant "The Island Hawk" a "song for the first launching of His Majesty's Aerial Navy," one finds, seventy years later than the time set by Darwin the elder, the modern version of his "flying chariot," moved by steam, and in "The Admiral's Ghost" as good a yarn as ever was spun in verse. As is customary with Mr. Noyes, there is little resemblance between any two poems in the volume: the elegies excepted, they do not fall into groups and although the number already mentioned is fairly large it leaves the greater part uncharacterized in any way. The title poem deals with the region of the glory and the dream, of the time when the young soul is yet attended by the vision splendid, and deals most worthily. The "pitiless walls of gray" as he calls the abode of manhood have not chilled him. Like Buchanan's Poet he sings "and goes sailing on into the west, blown on by airs divine." F. A. Stokes Company.