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from among previously uncollected pieces. the author has chosen for preservation the sixty-seven titles now included in the "Selected Poems of Charles Hanson Towne." Like Francis Thompson, the theme of his introductory verses, Mr. Towne remains essentially "the quiet singer," even in his most ambitious and best-known poem, "Manhattan," with its effective mingling of soliloquy, narration, description, and song. So the beauty in his work is a quiet, unostentatious beauty like that of his quatrain,

SILENCE

I need not shout my faith. Thrice eloquent

Are quiet trees and the green listening sod.

Hushed are the stars, whose power is never spent;

The hills are mute-yet how they speak of God!

The appeal of Miss Babette Deutsch's second collection, "Honey Out of Rock," is to the intellect rather than to the heart. Revealing a keen, educated mind and a sensitive spirit inclined to melancholy musings, a cultivated taste for pomegranates, bergamot, and bloomy plums, and a patent cognizance of old ivory, mosaics, jades, lapis lazuli, tapestries, green bowls, and other colorful articles of virtu dear to the imagists, it is sure of being amply praised by responsible critics. Wherefore I feel the freer to confess that it commands my esteem without stirring my enthusiasm, that it leaves me not unappreciative, but cold.

6

Aside from the merits of his work, there is something fine in the courage with which Alfred Noyes maps out wide realms to conquer for the domain of poetry. In the plan of his trilogy, "The Torch-Bearers," he has taken all science for his province. As the first volume of the trilogy, "Watchers of the Sky," dealt with the great astronomers, so the second, "The Book of Earth," tells of the revealers of creation through evolution, from Pythagoras and Aristotle down through Darwin and Huxley. A certain tendency toward literalness, a conscientious desire to get in all the facts, continue to lead Mr. Noyes into prolixities and anticlimaxes. He would be a better or more effective poet if he were something more of an editor. But his daring in putting into blank verse even the meeting at the British Association and the debate on evolution between Huxley and Bishop 'Selected Poems of Charles Hanson Towne. D. Appleton & Co., New York. $1.50.

* Honey Out of Rock. By Babette Deutsch. D. Appleton & Co., New York. $1.50.

The Book of Earth. By Alfred Noyes. The Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. $2.50.

Service cannot stop

The telephone, like the human heart, must repair itself while it works. The telephone system never rests, yet the ramifications of its wires, the reach of its cables and the terminals on its switchboards must ever increase. Like an airplane that has started on a journey across the sea, the telephone must repair and extend itself while work is going on.

To cut communication for a single moment would interrupt the endless stream of calls and jeopardize the well-being and safety of the community. The doctor or police must be called. Fire may break out. Numberless important business and social arrangements must be made.

Even when a new exchange is built and put into use, service is not interrupted. Conversations started through the old are cut over and finished through the new, the talkers unconscious that growth has taken place while the service continues.

Since 1880 the Bell System has grown from 31 thousand to 16 million stations, while talking was going on. In the last five years, additions costing a billion dollars have been made to the system, without interrupting the service.

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Wanted - Cartoons

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TO OUTLOOK Wishes to receive care

from their favorite newspaper. Each cartoon should have the sender's name and address together with the name and date of the newspaper from which it is taken pinned or pasted to its back. Cartoons should be mailed flat, not rolled. We pay one dollar ($1) for each cartoon which we find available for reproduction. Some readers in the past have lost payment to which they were entitled because they failed to give the information which we require. It is impossible for us to acknowledge or return cartoons which prove unavailable for publication.

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There are lovely words:

Peace, Regret, Delight,
One is like a white image
Against a velvet night,
One is like a slim girl

Shrouded and bowed,
One is like a leaping child
Laughing out loud.

Every image is true, unforced, and
convincing, and the verbal music is per-
fect.

Even in her occasional verses of
satire and protest Miss Widdemer never
forgets to be a poet.

'Ballads and Lyrics. By Margaret Widdemer. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York. $1.75.

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because she gets on his nerves; he goes to work painting wheels; he accepts the love of a married woman, just as she gives herself to him, casually and after seeing her only two or three times. Contrasted are quaint Sponge Martin and his wife, common as common can be, who get drunk and go fishing together all their elderly lives with faithful if vulgar attachment. The idea shown reversely seems to be that the more passion gets away from the primitive, the more somber its victims become and the less spontaneous and the more respectable their conduct. Granted; but what of it? the reader asks. A moralist might deduce the value of restraint and respect for the rights of society. Nothing is farther from the intention here. The author simply shows certain people and certain things as he sees them. If the disclosure shocks us in its naturalistic expression, so much the worse for us. "That's how it was, anyway," the author seems to say, and Bruce declares, "What a jumble, what a mixed, unaccountable thing life could be!"

SOMEWHERE SOUTH IN SONORA. By Will Levington Comfort. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $2.

A capital story of Mexico and Arizona. It has action and peril, but it has also imagination and it renders character truly. Bert, a New York boy, is laughed at when he longs for the Western cow country, and at first he does find more Fords than cows there. But there are bandits aplenty in old Mexico, and Bert has his fill of adventure.

SEA LAVENDER. By S. F. Gowing. Henry Holt & Co., New York. $2.

A lightly romantic tale. The charming Lavinia Lavender conceals an escaped convict (innocent, as most convicts of romance are) and with him and his wartime chums sets up "Lavender's Beach Pierrots," in which he is the lady-star and she the manager. His twin brother is the real criminal, and when he comes under the influence of Lavinia he joyfully takes his innocent brother's place in jail. Lavinia doesn't marry her "convict," but a nice elderly admiral-why, Heaven knows. There is a delightful retired prize-fighter in the story; why didn't Lavinia marry him if it was absolutely necessary to dodge the conventional ending? Amusing, but not well planned.

its predecessor, "Many Marriages," is
generally conceded. The "dark laugh-
ter" is that of the singing, chuckling,
care-free sub-chorus of Negroes, just out-
side the scene of action. But why
"dark"? The Negro accompaniment is
cheerful enough; the laughter is that of
primitive naturalism, irresponsible, ani-
malistic. Perhaps what Mr. Anderson is
suggesting (he certainly is not trying to
teach anything) is that primal passion is
pretty near the surface with all of us.
His newspaper man, Bruce, is as morally
irresponsible as the Negroes. He has a
vague impulse, never fulfilled, to write
out of his heart instead of reporting local
New York news; he leaves his commonplace wife
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The Editors of The Outlook 120 East 16th Street

RUBEN AND IVY SEN. By Louise J. Miln. The

Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. $2.

Readers who found Oriental glamour in the author's two Chinese romances, "The Shantung Garden" and "Mr. and Mrs. Sen," will like to follow this new. story, in which appears the old theme of the consequences of mixed marriages.

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Here the son and daughter of a Chinese father and English mother react conversely to their mixed racial descent. The story is readable and well told.

THE IRON CHALICE. By Octavus Roy Cohen. Little, Brown & Co., Boston. $2.

A desperate man agrees with a big crook to postpone his suicide for a year, insuring his life for a large sum in favor of a wife provided by the crook. That is an original invention, but more-much more is needed to make a good novel. We like better Mr. Cohen's darky stories.

SYCAMORE BEND. By Frazier Hunt. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York. $2.

A country town and its country editor are all too faithfully described. The atmosphere and depiction are true, but the story lingers too long in the telling. When the country editor tackles journalism in the big city, the interest quickens somewhat. "Nice but sluggish," will be the reader's verdict.

THE CHICKEN-WAGON FAMILY. By Barry Benefield. The Century Company, New York. $2.

To steer safely a true course between sentimentalism and aridity is a test hard to meet. Mr. Benefield makes us see and like this little family who drive their chicken-wagon from Louisiana to New York and set up life in an old fire-engine house. With them comes a newspaper man, who relates the tale. With his aid they actually buy their queer home, take boarders, and, after Father Tippany buys and sells second-hand bathtubs by the hundred, they prosper and flourish. All this is simple and sound in sentiment. The latter part, in which the newspaper man, sacrificing his own love for the father's daughter, takes over, so to speak, a bad lady who is vamping Father Tippany, is too melodramatic to fit in with the pleasing charm of the beginning. But the end is happy.

THE MARRIAGE GUEST. By Konrad Bercovici. Boni & Liveright, New York. $2.

Mr. Bercovici's short stories have been so brilliant, so rarely otherwise than completely satisfying, that it would be a pleasure to welcome his first novel with undiluted praise. Praise indeed it deserves; his pictures of the Little Germany of New York's East Side as it used to be are admirable, especially that of Anton Zwenge, the violin repairer, and his little circle-the baker, the shoemaker, and others of the older men whose pride and joy by day is in the honest achievement of their hands and by night in their Gesangsverein, where they sing good songs, drink good beer, and enjoy good fellowship. Admirable too is the family tragedy when Anton, faithful and patient worker with a musician's soul, who never earns, nor cares

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On the Other Side

AVE you made your plans for your Fall trip? That's the time the cruises start for Port Saïd, Singapore, and points East. Why not begin now to plan definitely to see at least one spot you've never seen before?

You can make all your arrangements mathematically perfect
if you work out the details with the Travel Bureau.
Where shall it be?

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HOTEL AND TRAVEL BUREAU

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to, more than his twenty dollars a week is both figuratively and literally ousted from his place by his practically pro gressive wife, who sets up a shop for the sale of cheap music and cheap instru ments, which he despises only the more when it overpoweringly succeeds. But the pivotal theme of the story is inher ently repulsive, and would remain so even were Mr. Bercovici more reticent in dealing with its disagreableness than he has unfortunately felt it necessary to be

SAMUEL DRUMMOND. By Thomas Boyd Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

$2.

Soundly wrought, simple, serious, sincere, this presentation of the life of an Ohio farmer in Civil War times is a novel to command the critic's immediate respect. Less immediately, perhaps, may win the appreciation of the average careless and hasty novel reader, for Sam uel is a slow-minded, commonplace man hero only in that he is capable of heroic toil, and neither is his love story prettified into an idyll nor his troubles emphasized into tragic gloom. A good and true book, of quiet but steadily increasing interest.

Essays and Criticism

CHARLES DICKENS, AND OTHER ANS.

VICTORI

By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. $3.

The good Sir Arthur has given us an other book, and a very fine book it is These papers, with one exception, were given as the Edward VII Lectures in Eng lish Literature at Cambridge last year and have been reprinted exactly as delivered omitting only requests to the janitor to close the windows. Treating of Thackeray, Trollope, and such strangely assorted pair as Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell, the book is mainly, as the title suggests, concerned with Dickens and Sir Arthur approaches the great Vic torian with almost the enthusiasm of Chesterton on the same subject-tem pered, of course, with such reticence a becomes a Fellow of Jesus.

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"Yet if it comes to the mere wonder work of genius-the creation of men an women on a page of paper, who an actually more real to us than our dail acquaintances, I do not see wha English writer we can choose to put sec ond to Shakespeare save Charles Dick ens." Here is a statement which wil raise many eyebrows in the comin months, but one which we are scarcel fitted to deny, for, granting his origina premise, our own feelings would accep it utterly.

Furthermore, he goes a long wa toward disarming those who do not se eye to eye with him by raising littl objection to the critical brickbats whic have been thrown at Charles Dickens

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"The opening chapter of 'Martin Chuz- ୮ zlewit,' which I suppose to be about the sorriest piece of writing ever perpetrated by a great English writer." "His plots are not merely stagey, melodramaticthey are seen to repeat themselves with an almost singular lack of invention." He also makes proper apology for most of "Oliver Twist" and Dickens's theatricality, after which he shows with a few quotations what the man could write, the man who created the strange, impossible, fantastic world of his novels, and filled it with a host of such deathless people as Pickwick, Micawber, the Marchioness, Sam Weller, Fagin, and Little Dorrit, and then supports his own opinions by citing Tolstoy, Chesterton, George Gissing, Swinburne, and Saintsbury.

To Thackeray he is not so kind. He finds him snobbish, over-inclined to preachiness, and occasionally cruel; but to his style and to the music of his prose he is more than fair. After offering a generous portion of the marvelous stuff to be found in "Vanity Fair," he adds: "He was a great melancholy man, with his genius running in streaks, often in thin streaks about him, but always, when uttered, uttered in liquid lovely prose."

Of Quiller-Couch's own prose it would not be amiss to say a word. His is a style touched with an old-fashioned preciousness which is often amusing, and occasionally annoying, but it is a rhythmic style, and a distinguished style, which is refreshing to one grown weary of the carefully cultivated vulgarity which infests modern American critical writing. Although the prophet Samuel would seem to be a defender of one of the editors of the "American Mercury" when he says, "And it came to pass that night that the word of the Lord came || unto Nathan" (2 Samuel vii. 4), we often find Mr. Nathan transmitting that word in a language sadly at variance with that of King James's commentators. Quiller-Couch, on the other hand, has traveled so long with the tall ships of literature that he seems to have caught a trifle of the wind that fills their sails.

Biography

FURTHER REMINISCENCES, 1864-1894. By S. Baring-Gould. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York.

$6.

The reverend author of this could have written books forever-and very nearly did so. He was a lively, vigorous, and apparently rather overbearing parson of the Anglican Church, interested in everything on the face of the earth, especially in his own Devon, and capable of writing in an interesting fashion about it. In addition to hymns ("Onward, Christian Soldiers," was one), novels, and books

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