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Paul Thompson

such vividness, power, and truth! We have no example of his work in any public gallery in London; nor have we anything by W. M. Chase, Arthur B. Davies, Swain Gifford, J. W. Alexander, George Inness, or De Forest Brush. It is more than time for another American Exhibition. As it is, the only modern American artists of whom there is any general knowledge in England are Mr. Sargent and Mr. Pennell, and the late E. A. Abbey, G. H. Boughton, and Whistler.

The Boston Gallery also is the proud possessor of the rough and unfinished but "speaking" likeness of George Washington, by his predestined limner, Gilbert Stuart, and also a companion presentment of Washington's wife. Looking upon this lady's countenance and watching a party of schoolgirls who were making the tour of the rooms, not uncomforted on their arduous adventure by chocolate and other confections, it occurred to me that if America increases her present love of eating sweets, due, I am told, not a little to prohibition, George Washington will gradually disappear into the background and Martha Washington, who has given her name to candy, be venerated instead -the Sweet Mother of her Country.

"I SHALL LONG TREASURE THE MEMORY OF

THE WARM RED BRICK AND EASY PROPORTIONS OF

INDEPENDENCE HALL, AT PHILADELPHIA "

To return to pictures, one of my special purposes in visiting Boston was to see the decorations in the Public Library by Puvis de Chavannes, by Abbey, and by Mr. Sargent, and I was pained to find that the work of the two American artists has become so dingy. The colors seem either to have sunk in or to be overlaid by grime. The great Frenchman's cool tones have worn better. And then I went to Mrs. Jack Gardner's, where I had the privilege of seeing not only another of America's Vermeers but another of America's ica's Vermeers but another of America's architectural fantasias-for the picture was isolated for me against a stone column in a courtyard that might have been in Florence.

I was fortunate in the city over which William Penn, in giant effigy, keeps watch and ward, in having as guide, philosopher, and friend Mr. A. Edward Newton, the Johnsonian, and the author of one of the best examples of "amateur" literature that I know "The Amenities of Book-Collecting." Mr. Newton took me everywhere, even to the little seventeenth-century Swedish church, which architecturally may be described as the antipodes of Philadelphia's newest

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glory, the Curtis Building, where editors are lodged like kings and can be attained to (if at all) only through marble halls. We went to St. Peter's, where, suddenly awakening during the sermon, one would think one's self to be in a London city church; and to the Historical Museum, where I found among the Quaker records many of my own ancestors, and was bewildered amid such a profusion of relics of Penn, Washington, and Franklin. In the old Library were more traces of Franklin, including his famous electrical appliance-again testifying to the. white flame with which American hero-worship can burn; and we found the sagacious Benjamin once more at the Franklin Inn, where the simplicity of the eighteenth century mingles with the humor and culture of the twentieth. We then drove through several miles of Fairmount Park, stopping for a few minutes in the hope of finding the late J. G. Johnson's Vermeer in the gallery there; but for the moment it was in hiding, the walls being devoted to his Italian pictures.

Finally we drew up at the gates of that strange and imposing Corinthian temple which might have been dislodged from its original site and hurled to Philadelphia by the first Quaker, Poseidon-the Girard College. This solemn fane we were permitted to enter only on convincing the porter that we were no ministers of religion-an easy enough task for Mr. Newton, who wears with grace the natural abandon of a Voltairean, but a difficult one for. me. Why the worthy "merchant and mariner was so suspicious of the cloth, no matter what its cut, I do not know; no doubt he had his reasons; but his prejudices are faithfully respected by his janitor, whose eye is a very gimlet of suspicion. However, we got in and saw the philanthropist's tomb and his household effects behind those massive columns.

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That evening I spent in Mr. Newton's library among Blake and Lamb and Johnson autographs and MSS., breaking the Tenth Commandment with a recklessness that would have satisfied and delighted Stephen Girard's gate keeper; and the next day we were off to Valley Forge to see with what imaginative thoughtfulness the Govern ment has been transforming Washing ton's camp into a National Park and restoring the old landmarks. It was a fine spring day and the woods were flecked with the white and pink blossoms of the dogwood-a tree which in England is only an inconspicuous hedgerow bush, but here has both charm and importance and some of the unexpect edness of tropical growth. I wish we could acclimatize it.

The memorial chapel now in course of completion on one of the Valley Forge eminences seemed to me a very

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admirable example not only of modern Gothic but of votive piety. And such a wealth of American symbolism cannot exist elsewhere But in the severe little cottage where Washington made his headquarters, down by the stream, with all his frugal campaigning furniture and accessories in their old place, I felt more emotion than in the odor of sanctity. The simple reality of it conquered the stained glass.

Looking back on it all, I realize that America never struck me as a new country, although its inhabitants often seemed to be a new people. The cities are more mature than the citizens. New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington-all have an air of permanence and age. The buildings, even when most fantastic, suggest indigenousness or at least stability; nor would the presence of more ancient structures increase this effect. To the eye of the ordinary Englishman, accustomed to work in what we call the City, in Fleet Street, in the Strand, in Piccadilly or in Oxford Street, New York would not appear to be a younger place than London, and Boston might easily strike him as older. Nor is London more than a little older, except in spots, such as the Tower and the Temple and the Abbey and that little Tudor row in Holborn, all separated by vast tracts of modernity. Indeed, I would almost go further and say that London sets up an illusion of being newer even than New York, by reason of its more disturbing street traffic both in the roads and on the footways, and the prevalence of the gayly colored omnibus which thunders along so many thoroughfares, in notable contrast with the sedate and sober vehicles that serve Fifth Avenue and are hardly seen elsewhere.

Meanwhile an illusion of antiquity is set up by New York's habit of commingling business houses and private residences-which surely belongs to an older order of society. In London we have done away with such a blend. Our

nearest approach to Fifth Avenue is, I suppose, Regent Street; but there are no mansions among the shops of Regent Street. Our shops are there and our mansions are elsewhere, far away, in what we call residential quarters-such as Park Lane, Queen's Gate, the Bayswater Road, and Grosvenor Square. To turn out of Fifth Avenue into the quiet streets where people live is to receive a distinct impression of sedateness such as New York is never supposed to convey. One has the same feeling in the other great cities.

But when it comes to their inhabitants, there are, to the English eye, fewer signs of maturity. I have never been able to get rid of the idea that every one I have met in America, no matter how grave a senior, instead of being really and self-consciously in the thick of life, is only getting ready to begin. Perhaps this is due in part to the pleasure, the excitement almost, which American business men-and all Americans are business men-take in their work. They not merely do it, but they enjoy doing it, and they watch them selves doing it. They seem to have a knack of withdrawing aside and observ. ing themselves as from the stalls, not without applause. In other words, they dramatize continually. Now one does not do this when one is old-it is a child's game-and it is another proof that they are younger than we, who do not enjoy our work, and indeed most of us are ashamed of it, and want the world to believe that we live like the lilies on private means.

Similarly, many Americans seem, when they talk, to be two personsone the talker and the other the listener, charmed by the quality of his discourse. There is nothing detrimental in such duplicity. Indeed, I think I have a very duplicity. Indeed, I think I have a very real envy of it. But I have no envy of the American man's inability to "loaf and invite his soul," as his great democratic poet was able to do. I think his unfamiliarity with armchair life is a

misfortune. That article of furniture we must suppose is for older civilizations, where men have either, after earning the right to recline, taken their ease gracefully, or have inherited their fortune and are partial to idleness. It consorts ill with those who are still either continually and restlessly in pursuit of the dollar or are engaged in the occupation of watching dollars arrive.

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One of the things, I take it, for Americans to learn is how to transform money into a friend. So many men who ought to be quietly rejoicing in their riches seem still to be anxious and acquisitive; so many men who have become suddenly wealthy seem to be allowing their gains to ruin their happiness. For the Nation's good nearly every one, I fancy, has too much money.

If I were an American, although I traveled abroad now and then (and I hold that it is the duty of a man to see other lands but live in his own), I should concentrate on America. It is the country of the future.

I am glad I have seen it and now know something-however slightabout it, at first hand. I made many friends there and amassed innumerable delightful memories. But what is the use of eight weeks? I am ashamed not to have come sooner and humiliated by the brevity of my stay. I have had the opportunity only to lift a thousand curtains, get a glimpse of the entertainment on the other side and drop them again. I should like to come here every other year and have time-time to make the acquaintance of a naturalist and learn from him the names of birds and trees and flowers; time to disregard the sailing of ships; time to loiter in the byways; time to penetrate into deeper strata where intimacies strike root and the real discoveries are made; time to discern beneath the surface, so hard and assured, something fey, something wistful, the sense of tears.

A great agricultural revolution is taking place in America. J. Madison Gathany describes it in next week's issue of The Outlook in the second of his articles on "What's the Matter with the Eastern Farmer ?" He traveled over 3,500 miles during July and August to obtain his facts for these articles. He talked to hundreds of farmers, farmers' wives, hired help, bankers, merchants, and farm authorities. He is no dilettante when it comes to the problems of the American farmer. He was born in a log cabin in the hills of Pennsylvania, and was raised on a farm.

(See offer on page 171)

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THE VESSEL

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From H. Colin Campbell, Oak Park, Ill.

A CONCRETE OIL TANKER BUILT IN AN UNUSUAL WAY AFTER AN UNUSUAL DESIGN The accompanying views show various stages and features of construction of one of two concrete vessels intended for the transport of crude oil from the Mexican fields at Tampico to Texas refineries. These unusual vessels have been building for several months. They are novel not only in form but because of the methods followed in their construction. The entire hull and most of the superstructure are of concrete. The bow and stern sections were cast in normal position, but the several sections between going to make up the entire vessel were cast vertical, just as concrete tanks are built, then lowered into place, properly lined up and connected by depositing cement with the device known as a cement gun

THE BOOK TABLE: DEVOTED TO BOOKS AND THEIR MAKERS

THE "JUST ISSUED" OF FIFTY YEARS AGO

W

BY WARWICK JAMES PRICE

HAT were the new books put into our grandparents' hands in 1871? What stories and poems were they reading fresh from the presses of that mid-Victorian day, with Grant seated in the American White House? What "heavier" works were serving as texts for a more serious few-titles now catalogued as history or science, philosophy or religion, then first winning right to the "standard" position they have come to enjoy? Despite the space so called for, it would be more than a little interesting to give the full list of the issues of half a century back, for nothing would better prove the contention that of every 1,000 volumes 650 fail to outlive the very year of issue, that only 100 reach a ten-year I life, and that not above a dozen exceed that. This is out of the question, however. Such statistics are probably not attainable even by the patient research of delving scholarship. Only a very few, relatively speaking, may be here set down; the best of the period, of course, generally considered, though of real interest, too, albeit of other sort, since, as Andrew Lang once said, "Tell me the books a man reads and I'll tell you the kind of man he is." So, what manner of folk were our fathers' and mothers' fathers and mothers?

The background to the literary events of 1871 was not unlike that of to-day, in that a war had but just closed and political happenings of lasting import were occurring in parts of Europe. January 18 saw the King of Prussia proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and a fortnight later Paris capitulated. The Commune burst in mid-March. August closed with order again restored and Thiers duly named first President of the Third Republic. The second of the two main currents of European events was of course the unification of Italy under the "Great" Victor Emmanuel. The doctrine of Papal Infallibility marked the time, it is true, but the Papal States had ceased to exist as a separate entity in the peninsula, and Rome's self had become the capital of the Kingdom, with Pius IX quite literally a prisoner in the Vatican. In which connection it is to the point to recall that Richard Henry Dana, Jr., " Free Soiler as he had been in the years following his stirring "Two Years Before the Mast," now set to paper his "Letters on Italian Unity," to-day forgotten, though then widely read.

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Gladstone was another of the many publicists of the time to express high hopes of Italy's enlarged future, but these

were

confined to his speeches in the Commons, where he had been for three years leading his first Government. His great opponent, Disraeli, was in that same twelvemontli preparing his novels for collected issue, the "Lothair" of '70 rounding out the trio of "Coningsby," "Sybil," and "Tancred," which had stirred the select circles of the later forties. In 1871 the British Commission upon the revision of the Bible had been at work for several months; Stanley was in Africa on that famous search which was at last to lead him to the lost Livingston; the Suez Canal had

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been open for traffic rather more than a year, and the Mont Cenis Tunnel had just been completed. The Polaris expedition was setting out on a vain quest for the Pole. Revolt held its customary stage in Mexico. Japan was abolishing feudalism. French and American troops were ashore in Korea, protecting interests which a religious outbreak had threatened. In this country, New York was agog over the exposure of the Tweed Ring and Grant was to take the first step towards Civil Service Reform. George William Curtis, by the by, then seated in the "Editor's Easy Chair" in the house of Harpers, was

(C) George Grantham Bain

FIFTY YEARS AGO MARK TWAIN WAS BUSY SETTLING DOWN IN HIS NEW HOME AT HARTFORD-AND JUST YESTERDAY THIS SAME HOME OF HIS WAS THROWN ON THE OPEN MARKET

to serve on the Civil Service Commission, writing, "It may well prove the most worthwhile work to which I ever laid hand," to George Henry Boker, then just gone out to Constantinople as our Minister to the Porte.

It was the year of the deaths of Herschel and Paul de Kock, of Alice and Phoebe Cary (within six months one of the other), and of the veterans Grote and Ticknor. It was the birth year of Synge and "Coniston" Churchill. Vaughan Moody and Lawrence Binyon were babes in arms, Gorky and Rostand were toddlers, Clyde Fitch and Kipling, H. G. Wells and Le Gallienne were in the nursery, W. W. Jacobs and "Anthony Hope," W. J. Locke and "Q," scarce out of it. School days were opening for Hewlett and Seaman and Barrie and Owen Wister, for Crockett and Doyle and Jerome, for Margaret Deland and Alice Brown. Woodrow Wilson had reached the antiquity of fifteen; Jusserand was a year older still, while legal maturity had but then come to Du Maupassant and Robert Louis Stevenson, Pierre Loti and Augustine Birrell and Eugene Field. Henley was taking the first tentative steps in London journalism; Lanier was making a beginning at the law in his father's Southern office.

If these were yet a distance from pro

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ductive years, there were a-many others of tried and valued skill, equally silent for the time. Carlyle, though alive, had ceased to write. Bancroft, working steadily upon his periodically published volumes, sent none to the press in '71. Parkman's " Old Régime in Canada," to be the fifth in his splendid series, was in the making only. Motley, just recalled from the Ambassadorship of St. James's, had begun upon the "John of Barnevelde," to be offered the public in another two years. Green's "Short History" and Stubbs's "Constitutional History were also to appear in '74. Forster was closing his Life of Dickens, while that co-laborer of "Boz," Wilkie Collins, having finished his "Man and Wife the summer previous, was now supervising the dramatizing and producing of "The Woman in White," which a dozen years before had introduced English novel readers to the delightfully wicked Fosco and boringly virtuous Fairlie. It was the year when Besant and Rice, having formed one of the happiest partnerships known to leters, were casting into shape" Ready Money Mortiboy." Charles Kingsley and George Meredith and Samuel Clemens, whatever they may have been writing, were publishing nothing; "Mark Twain," indeed, was at the moment settling down in the new house at Hartford, too busy to think of starting on a successor to "Innocents Abroad."

The poetic sensation of the world was still the "Collected Poems" which Dante Gabriel Rossetti had sent forth, to be attacked so virulently in '72 by Robert Buchanan's "The Fleshly School" in the "Contemporary Review," and to be defended so scathingly (to Buchanan et al.) by the young Swinburne in his "Under the Microscope. Edwin Arnold (still a half-dozen years short of Iris "Sir") was silent, as were Whittier and Holmes. Bayard Taylor, with the scholarly "Faust a twelvemonth its road upon of long success, was beginning "The Masque of the Gods." Aldrich, editing "Every Saturday," found no time for versifying on his own account.

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But there were "big books," none the less. Robert Browning, for instance, then living, a widower, on Warwick Crescent, published in 1871 not only his "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," but also "Balaustion's Adventure," and Bryant, just off for a year in Mexico, found time between his addresses on Italian liberty and Morse to supervise the issue of his authoritative translation of the Odyssey. On the heels of this unquestioned volume came Darwin's "Descent of Man," so widely questioned as to find Frances Power Cobb but one of thousands feeling "deadliest alarm " upon its reading; nor. was fouryear-old Finley Peter Dunne yet able to reassure us with his pleasant idea about it being, after all, better to be an improvement on a monkey than a degenerated archangel. To balance Darwin, as it were, James Freeman Clarke, then closing his Harvard professorship in natural religion and Christian doctrine, in '71 issued the first of his searching volumes on the "Ten Great Religions of the World." Lowell, whose "Among My Books" had assured him the year before of primacy in American literary criticisin, now came out with the no less finished and delightful papers of "My Study Window."

Shall one set beside "The Descent of

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Man" and "Balaustion ""Alice Through the Looking-Glass " and " Middlemarch"? Or, to put it another way, what are the relative values of scientific surmise and poetic inspiration on the one side, and fanciful imagination and great character delineation on the other? Time herself has given true answer; Casaubon will outlive Balaustion, and the "Carroll" philosophy has won a larger following than Darwin's. Beyond all doubting, it is completely worth affectionate recalling that in 1871 the Mathematical Lecturer of Christ Church exactly doubled the world's debt to him by following the "Wonderland" Alice of '66 with this later chronicle of her adventures behind the mantel glass in her father's drawing-room. Tweedledum and -dee, the Mad Hatter and the White Knight, the Walrus and the Carpenter, what. an enriching was there of our happiest memories, what a spring of perpetual enjoyment! We were some day to have his immortal Snark, and "Sylvie and Bruno " were to sail into a sea of popularity, thanks largely to the Alician craft which had led the way, but it was 1871's volume which signed and sealed, while men shall read and children wonder, Dr. Dodgson's diploma as one of the Immortals of Letters. The place of "Middlemarch" in English fiction. is too assured to debate, however real a ground exists for the question as to whether or not it is George Eliot's greatest story. Comparatives are uncalled for certainly when one thinks again of the consistent hold the tale maintains on its readers, and of the perfect craftsmanship of the work which brought to us the miser Featherstone and the caustic Mrs. Cadwallader, Dorothea and the hypocritical Bulstrode. First editions of the novel bear date of 1872, but its inclusion in this roster is justified through the fact that in the close of 1871 it began its serial appearances in the honored pages of old "Blackwood's."

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The closing word of the paragraph suggests that '71 saw several changes of note in the more famous of the literary periodicals. Leslie Stephen had just gone over to edit the "Cornhill," which Thackeray had started a dozen years before. De Blowitz then took service with the London "Times," and John Boyle O'Reilly then became. part owner and whole editor of the Boston Pilot," in which his songs were appearing. Howells, supplanting James T. Fields in the "Atlantic" offices, was contributing "Their Wedding Journey" to its pages, where were carried, too, Fields's "Our Whispering Gallery"-a title advisedly changed later, for publication between. book covers, to "Yesterdays with Authors." John Hay's "Castilian Days was in its last installment as '71 came in; Henry James's "Watch and Ward " took over its space. Fiske, only five years out of Harvard, was writing for the magazine his Light and Darkness." Harte, who had just come East from a University of California professorship and his success as editor of the "Overland," set his name among those of Higginson and Lydia Maria Child and Stedman, Saxe and Celia Thaxter, Longfellow and Whittier and the Carys, as an "Atlantic" contributor. "Putnam's was in its heyday, with Parke Godwin at the helm, accepting material from such veterans as Buchanan Read and Goldwin Smith (who was packing up to seek Toronto after his Cornell years), and such newcomers as John Burroughs and R. H.

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Stoddard, the latter a clerk in the offices of the Dock Commission. Lowell was in '71 serving his last year as editor of the "North American Review," printing there many of the "My Study Window" papers, with Charles Francis Adams, Jr., covering so very modern-sounding a topic as "The

ON GROWING OLD
(From "Enslaved and Other Poems")
BY JOHN MASEFIELD

Be with me Beauty for the fire is dying,

My dog and I are old, too old for

roving,

Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying

Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.

I take the book and gather to the fire, Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute,

The clock ticks to my heart; a withered wire

Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.

I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander,

Your cornland, nor your hill-land nor your valleys,

Ever again, nor share the battle yonder Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies.

Only stay quiet while my mind remembers

The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.

Beauty, have pity, for the strong have power

The rich their wealth, the beautiful

their grace

Summer of man its sunlight and its flower

Spring time of man all April in a face. Only, as in the jostling in the Strand, Where the mob thrusts or loiters or is loud

The beggar with the saucer in his hand

Asks only a penny from the passing crowd,

So, from this glittering world with all its fashion

Its fire and play of men, its stir, its march,

Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion,

Bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch.

Give me but these, and though the darkness close

Even the night will blossom as the

rose.

Government and the Railroad Corporations."

Whitman and Longfellow, Tennyson and Ruskin, and not a few other men of first rank, were publishing in 1871, but issuing works not of their best. The "Democratic Vistas" of the "Good Gray Poet," for instance, was certainly neither of the caliber of the "Leaves of Grass" of '55 or the later "Specimen Days." Longfellow's "Divine Tragedy" is perhaps the weakest link in his poetic trilogy, as, indeed,

it was bound to be, since it was, after all, no more than a metrical paraphrase of the unapproachable Gospel telling of the story-even as Tennyson's "Gareth and Lynette," also of the '71 vintage, falls noticeably below the level of the earlier Idylls." Ruskin in this twelvemonth set his name to two title-pages not of first value " Fors Clavigera " and " At Last." Huxley, serving on the London School Board, issued a volume of essays, Freeman another, Froude his work on "Calvinism," and Tyndall his "Hours of Exercise in the Alps." "Friendship's Garland" was assuredly below the expected level of Matthew Arnold, who had just been awarded the order of Commander of the Crown of Italy in recognition of his tutorship of the Duke of Genoa; and Sir Arthur Helps, a C. B. on the latest Honor List, put out "Trivia" and a Life of Cortez.

There were other "second rankers," as we now place them, yet deserving of reminiscent mention; Palgrave's "Lyrical Poems," for one, uninspired but scholarly and far more readable than its presentday neglect might suggest, and, for another, the "Admetus," which had then just come from the youthful hand of the immensely talented Emma Lazarus, her second volume, though she was not yet twenty-three. It was the year of Trollope's "Sir Harry Hotspur" and "Ralph the Heir," of Reade's "Terrible Temptation" (following sharply after that "Put Yourself in His Place" which had presented labor trouble in a way strangely modern), of the "Tower Hill" of Ainsworth, with "Boscobel" next to come, and of two of the most delightful of the William Black romances- "A Daughter of Heth" and "The Monarch of Mincing Lane," though the latter came from the presses anonymously. Eggleston then sent forth "The Hoosier Schoolmaster," the first of his eight stories, and Louisa Alcott followed the ever-charming "Little Women" of '68 and "An Old-Fashioned Girl" of '70 with "Little Men."

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Are some of these close upon being forgotten? What, then, of Bulwer's "Julian Fane" and Mrs. Stowe's "Pink and White Tyranny," of Henry Kingsley's 'Hetty" and Mrs. Craik's "Hannah"-all of '71's imprint? This mention of "Miss Mulock," by the way, suggests still another of the books of the day-one which nret with most enthusiastic welcoming though it now rests gray with the undisturbed dust of years. Mrs. Craik had stood godmother to Philip Bourke Marston, had addressed to him her " Philip My King," and now this blind poet, just of legal age, gave the public that "Song-Tide and Other Poems which no less a one than Dante Rossetti thought "worthy of Shakespeare in his subtlest lyric moods." Alas for the judgments of past time! One wonders if an examination of Whipple's "Success and its Conditions," the last of the forty titles this semi-centenary list, embodied criteria as little dependable.

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Enslaved and Other Poems. By John Masefield. The Macmillan Company, New York. Mr. Masefield has again vindicated his right to be placed among the very foremost of modern English poets. His mastery of rhythm and his narrative power were never more strikingly shown than in the present volume. One of the shorter poems from this collection is republished on this page.

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