"a stintless muse;' I do not like "dulcifluous," and I think such words as 'neath, 'scaped, 'mid, are too often in evidence. It is perhaps unnecessary to say of a follower of Wordsworth that he is not dramatic. He may, like Tennyson, come to that also bye and bye.

These are his obvious faults, and these seem to be his limitations. He is a young man, and is likely to outgrow and falsify any present estimate of his powers. We come now to the illustration of his positive merits. They outnumber and cover his defects. Wordsworthian, he naturally looks with scorn on the ordinary amatory poet, but if he gives us many more snatches like this we shall forgive him:

As a

"Thy voice from inmost dreamland calls;
The wastes of sleep thou makest fair;
Bright o'er the ridge of darkness falls
The cataract of thy hair.

The morn renews its golden birth;

Thou with the vanquished night dost fade; And leav'st the ponderable earth

Less real than thy shade."

Is it too much to say that this is in the best spirit of the master? Hear also his brief description of a storm:

"Under the dark and piny steep

We watched the storm crash by; We saw the bright brand leap and leap Out of the shattered sky." He is not a specialist, or a realist in a realist in the narrow sense. The universal note in his verse is not restricted by the occasion which calls it forth. His muse is not urban or daintily artificial like that of Austin Dobson,

"And 'tis for her a sweet despair

To watch that courtly step and air." He clings as a rule to the simpler forms of stanza, but is fond of sonnets, and most of his sonnets bear more or less upon public affairs. He has several upon the Soudanese expedition of 1885. We thus see he has been doing very good work for a matter of twelve years. Truly, art is long!

The following lines from one of the sonnets on General Gordon have in themselves an accent almost of greatness. The battle has been and passed:

"Arab, Egyptian, English-by the sword Cloven, or pierced with spears, or bullet

mown

In equal fate they sleep: their dust is grown A portion of the fiery sands abhorred."

The author's latest book is entitled "The Year of Shame." It is a passionate remonstrance against the policy of the Powers, which allows a continuance of Armenian butcheries, unbearable misgovernment of the fairest portions of Eastern Europe, and all the unspeakable atrocities of the Turk. To Russia, to France, he appeals; even to America, for he deplores the war talk of last year, and calls upon us to help rather than hinder England in her mission of smiting the cruel and succoring the oppressed. He conceives that England herself has disregarded her duty and broken her pledges. He calls upon her to rise and put away her shame; he calls upon those in power:

"You in high places; you that drive the steeds Of Empire; you that say unto our hosts 'Go thither;' and they go."

He decries the weak repudiators of responsibility who ask, "Am I my brother's keeper?" He pours his scorn upon all time-servers and mock patriots; he loves his England; he would see her right, brave, generous, great in the best sense; and he speaks to the consciences of all good men that they make a stand now for humanity and honor. To Glad

stone, whose reputation as a friend of the Greeks dates beyond the memory of the present generation, he addresses a sonnet which I cannot refrain from quoting in full:

"Speak once again with that great note of thine,

Hero withdrawn from Senates and their sound
Unto thy home by Cambria's northern bound,
Speak once again, and wake a world supine.
Not always, not in all things was it mine
To follow where thou led'st: but who hath
found

Another man so shod with fire, so crowned With thunder, and so armed with wrath divine?

Lift up thy voice once more! The nation's heart

Is cold as Anatolia's mountain snows.
Oh, from these alien paths of base repose
Call back thy England, ere thou too depart-
Ere, on some secret mission thou too start,
With silent footsteps, whither no man knows."

We all know that he did lift up his voice. He needed not to be urged. But others have no doubt been awakened by the voice of the poet, which is not silent and will not be while the bloody drama progresses. When a short time since the little Hellenic kingdom spoke defiance to the Powers, we thought we heard once more a breath of that eloquence which of old

"Shook the arsenal and fulmined over Greece

To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne." Be sure the poet was not silent then. In anger against the concert of Powers he hailed the brave people and wrote: "Who are these would bind thy hands? Knaves and dastards, none beside.

All the just in all the lands

Hail the blest and sanctified."

Perhaps the following poem quoted in full is as simply impressive as anything in the book. If Europe has not indeed. lost all sense of moral responsibility, the united cry of people, poet, statesman and king ought not to go unheeded.

EUROPE AT THE PLAY.

O languid audience, met to see The last act of the tragedy

On that terrific stage afar,

Where burning towns the footlights areO listless Europe, day by day

Callously sitting out the play!

So sat, with loveless count'nance cold,
Round the arena, Rome of old.
Pain, and the ebb of life's red tide,
So, with a calm regard, she eyed,
Her gorgeous vesture, million-pearled,
Splashed with the blood of half the world.
High was her glory's noon! As yet

She had not dreamed her sun could set!
As yet she had not dreamed how soon
Shadows should vex her glory's noon.
Another's pangs she counted nought;
Of human hearts she took no thought;
But God, at nightfall, in her ear
Thundered His thought exceeding clear.
Perchance in tempest and in blight,
On Europe, too, shall fall the night!
She sees the victim overborne,

By worse than ravening lions torn. She sees, she hears, with soul unstirred, And lifts no hand, and speaks no word, But vaunts a brow like theirs who deem Men's wrongs a phrase, men's rights a dream.

Yet haply she shall learn, too late,

In some blind hurricane of Fate,
How fierily alive the things

She held as fool's imaginings,
And, though circuitous and obscure,
The feet of Nemesis how sure.

Surely, when such things are written from time to time among us we cannot say that our poetry is dead. Some of us indeed believe this to be the dawning of a great era of poetry in America and England. Our poets to come will need a liberal dower of simplicity, sensuousness and passion, especially the last. We have now affectations of all three. They will need constructive ability, but that we always needed. Passion or force, Byronic force, is the main thing wanting. This we must look for, and this I think we shall find in some measure in Rudyard Kipling; while in William Watson we have a true, strong singer, who cares for his art and from whom we may justly expect very great things in the future.

THOMAS FLEMING.

Adolf Stern is already favorably known. as the author of a general history of literature; and in this new work, as in the former one, appears the same conservative, objective spirit of criticism. As he says in the introduction: "These studies have grown out of the desire to make clear to myself and others the worth, the development, the peculiarity of the living and late poets. I need not assure you that they are based on warm sympathy for the literature of the present, as also on the conviction that nothing is gained by treating contemptuously the ripened or still fermenting literary efforts of our day, even less than by that kind of exalted

ALPHONSE DAUDET.

criticism which claims for the latest poetic efforts that they eclipse and render worthless all that was written before 1870."

The work is written in German, and naturally it is more especially the contemporaneous German literature that is passed in review, although a few of the more prominent authors of other countries, such as Daudet in France, Tolstoy

HERMANN SUDERMANN.

characteristically speak of the novel as poetic prose; and the artistic requirements for it, as regards content and form, are as severe as those of any other literary production.

In an exceedingly interesting manner our author follows the external life, the temperamental peculiarities, the spiritual development of the different authors, showing their works to be the logical outcome of given conditions. One cannot lay aside the book without having gained renewed respect for a nation whose soul life is so rich and varied, and whose representative men struggle so earnestly to solve the problems of life and true art. The perusal of the book must surely arouse in every one the desire to become better acquainted with the works of such

PROBLEMS OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. By Edwin Lawrence Godkin.

Before the period at which these essays begin (1865) it was not clearly perceived that democratic institutions represented a changed condition in the whole social and economic world. We recognize now that democracy is a natural product of modern society, just as an absolute hereditary monarchy was of English life at the time of the Conquest, or as slavery was in the primitive world.

Mr. Godkin is a follower of Mill, as everyone must be who is worth listening to at all, but his method is in some respects more sure than Mill's. Among American writers he may be regarded as a legitimate successor of the authors of The Federalist. He has, however, qualifications entirely his own.

Certain causes have hitherto tended to obscure Mr. Godkin's authoritative position as a publicist and a writer upon government. They are involved in the history and circumstances of the time, which have fostered the temporary popularity of writers of a totally different and, as we believe, of a vastly inferior stamp. Anyone who will read the economical essays contained in this volume will have no difficulty in perceiving that they run counter to the philosophical fashion of the day. Their author would be put down as belonging to what is now called the "older" economical school, that is, the school of Smith, Mill, Ricardo, and Malthus, the founders of economic science. On the one side he would fall under the ban of the "new" or historic economists, who think that they have discovered that the method of inquiry pursued by those writers was in part false or narrow; and on the other hand, under that of the speculative socialists, who, detesting political economy as originally taught, endeavor to solve what they believe to be the problems of modern society by various panaceas, which are really day dreams. Both the new political economy and socialistic. speculations have had an extraordinary vogue during the last twenty years.

It can hardly be expected that those upon whose teachings a critic pronounces adverse judgment will be eager to testify to his competence. If he is right, they are sadly wrong, and accordingly much of Mr. Godkin's warning against false political and economic teaching has fallen upon inattentive ears. Between the true and false teachers in these matters it is very hard for the public at large to decide, except by the test of experience. "By their fruits ye shall know them" applies to economists and publicists as well as to others. Modesty forbids Mr. Godkin to mention the important fact that the movement for the reform of the civil service (the success of which he cites as a signal illustration of the danger of denying that

a democratic society has "the capacity and determination to remedy its own defects") was due originally to his own. unremitting efforts, in the teeth of ridicule and abuse on all sides. Looking back thirty years, we can say now that the foresight which detected in this reform the key to a great democratic advance was a no less signal illustration of the author's constructive political wisdom. In one of his essays he says that he is not an enthusiast for any form of government, because he regards government as an extremely serious kind of business, the problems of which cannot be solved by enthusiasm. This is one of those statements which mark out the essential character of the position he holds.

If Mr. Godkin's work be examined as a whole, it will be seen that there is not a distinctive principle underlying the independent movement of his period for which he has not found its best and most forcible expression, and not an impulse to action that has not received impetus, and in many cases, life from him.-Atlantic Monthly.

This is no ordinary history of the period, but deals mainly with matters. which a work of that description either ignores or treats in the slightest possible way. It narrates the little every-day things that form the chief topics of conversation and make up the bulk of news in the daily papers. Although the period was only sixty years ago, it seems whole centuries remote from the present day in many of the minutiae of social life. Railways were just beginning to be built, steam navigation was in its infancy, and modern science and art were as yet undeveloped. It was a time of general agricultural depression, and "Captain Swing" was the terror of the farmers. Riots were frequent in city and country.