Book Discussion

The Congo and Other Poems, by Vachel Lindsay. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Itis not too much to say that many of us are watching Vachel Lindsay with the undisguised hope in our hearts that he may yet prove to be the “Great American Poet.” He has come so fast and far on the road to art and sanity since the early days when he drew minute, and seemingly pathological, maps of the territories of heaven, and grinning grotesques of the Demon Rum! He has carved his own way with so huge and careless a hand! And his work, in spite of its strangeness, is so deeply rooted in the crude but stirring consciousness that is America to-day! Surely there is ground for hope.

Like every artist who creates a new form, Mr. Lindsay has had to educate his public. And the task is not by any means accomplished yet. We have had to overcome an instinctive feeling that poetry should be dignified, and to look the fact in the face that it must first of all be telling, and that in cases where these two elements conflict, dignity is a secondary consideration. We have been rudely jostled out of our academic position that poetry must be condensed, poignant, and literary, and we have been shown that by going back to the primitive conception—which included as the principal element the half-chant of the bard—true poetry may be diffuse, full of endless iterations and strangely impassioned over crude and even external objects. So much we have learned, and after the first shock of surprise, learned gladly. It has opened to us whole new reaches of enjoyment. We hope sincerely that we are not yet done with Mr. Lindsay’s educative process.

The Congois the title poem of his new volume. To describe the poem adequately would require almost as much space as the nine pages it occupies. So it must suffice to say that it is perilously near great poetry, broad in sweep, imaginative, full of fire and color, psychological—and very strange. Much in the same vein areThe Firemen’s BallandThe Santa Fe Trail, which appeared originally inPoetry.

Several of the poems in this volume, among themDarling Daughter of BabylonandI Went Down Into the Desert, are already familiar to readers ofThe Little Review, as they were first published in the June number. The volume contains also a delightful section of poems for children, and a group dealing with the present European war.

BothThe Congoand Mr. Lindsay’s earlier volume,General Booth Enters Heaven, are extraordinarily interesting books. Every mind which is truly alive to-day should know at least one of them.

[Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]

Almost simultaneously withThe Congohas appeared a prose volume by Mr. Lindsay,Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. It is an account, in the form of a diary, of a walk through Missouri and Kansas, and into Colorado. Its value is almost purely personal. To anyone who is interested in Mr. Lindsay’s striking personality, this book will serve as a spiritual Baedeker. As literature its value is comparatively slight. It contains, however, one of his most striking poems,The Kallyope Yell, which appeared originally inThe Forum. This alone is worth the price of the volume.

Eunice Tietjens.

The Man of Genius, by Herman Tuerck. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Professor Tuerck, a very normal German, has been writing critical essays since the end of the eighties, and he has not changed a bit—the same good old idealist of the sissy category. In this book he makes a study of Genius, and comes to the magnificent conclusion that the chief characteristics of a genius must be goodliness, loving kindness, respect, and loyalty to existing institutions, obedience to the law, objectivity, and truth. Naturally, those who do not possess these delicacies are villains. The professor demonstrates two groups of thinkers, one in angelic white, the other in devilish black. Among the first, the real geniuses, we find beside Christ, Buddha, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, also Alexander, Cæsar, and Napoleon. But oh, Mr. Wilson, what German atrocities! Mr. Tuerck mercilessly disfigures his victims and pastes upon them with his saliva accurate, uniform labels. InHamlet, inFaust, inManfred, in the mentioned law-givers and warriors, the author manages to discover goody-goody traits of exemplary burghers. In the Black Gallery we face the lugubrious sinners—Stirner, Nietzsche, and Ibsen. “Woe to him who follows these modern antisophers!” cries Mr. Tuerck, for they are enemies of humanity, of the state, of society, of reality, of truth, for they are selfish and subjective. “The Devil, the Father of Lies, is great and Friedrich Nietzsche is his prophet.”

A word of reassurance for Mr. Thomas Hardy. This Sauerkraut-gem,The Man of Genius, has hadseveneditions in Germany, and has aroused wide enthusiasm there, as witnessed by the numerous press-notices exaltingly praising the great idealist Tuerck, written by professors, Geheimraths, Hofraths, catholics, protestants, and even by socialists! Now, pray, ought there be any fear for the Nietzscheanization of the Fatherland?

Trees, and Other Poems, by Joyce Kilmer. [George H. Doran Company, New York.]

Mr. Kilmer furnishes the following prose account of his convictions: “I am catholic in my tastes and Catholic in religion, am socially a democrat and politically a Democrat. I am a special writer on the staff of theNew York Times Sunday Magazine, theTimes Review of Booksand theLiterary Digest. I am bored by Feminism, Futurism, Free Love.” This is perhaps a more succinct expression of his facility of faith than can be found in his verse. Readers should thank him for it, because it renders unnecessary any further attempt to discover what he believes.

At the opening of the volume, Mr. Kilmer quotes the following stanza from Coventry Patmore:

Mine is no horse with wings, to gainThe region of the Spheral chimeHe does but drag a rumbling wain,Cheered by the coupled bells of rhyme.

Mine is no horse with wings, to gain

The region of the Spheral chime

He does but drag a rumbling wain,

Cheered by the coupled bells of rhyme.

This, too, is useful, because it frankly warns us against looking in his verse for anything which is not there.

Within his self-imposed limitations, Mr. Kilmer has done good work. The amusing couplets aboutServant Girl and Grocer’s Boyhave pleased countless newspaper readers,The Twelve-Forty-Fiveis a graphic description of the feeling produced by a late suburban train,To a Young Poet Who Killed Himselfis an obvious rebuke to the small-hearted versifier, andOld Poetsis a comfortable exposition of the philosophy of comfort. The religious poems will probably not be moving to anyone who does not share Mr. Kilmer’s creed.

Mr. Kilmer’s work is glossy with a simplicity more easy-going than profound. Though he is young himself, he obviously does not sympathize with young poets, of whom he writes:

There is no peace to be takenWith poets who are young,For they worry about the wars to be foughtAnd the songs that must be sung.

There is no peace to be taken

With poets who are young,

For they worry about the wars to be fought

And the songs that must be sung.

His ideal is that of the “old poet”:—

But the old man knows that he’s in his chairAnd that God’s on His throne in the sky.So he sits by his fire in comfortAnd he lets the world spin by.

But the old man knows that he’s in his chair

And that God’s on His throne in the sky.

So he sits by his fire in comfort

And he lets the world spin by.

G. S.

Art, by Clive Bell. [Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.]

It is an exquisite pleasure to disagree with Clive Bell! Like a fierce Hun he whirls through the art galleries of Europe, and smashes all venerated masterpieces into a heap of rubbish, sparing but the Byzantine Primitives and some of the Post-Impressionists. Between these two epochs he sees a hideous gap; not more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 is he willing to accept as a work of art. It naturally hurts to witness the slaughter of your old friends, such as Michelangelo, Velasquez, Whistler; but our Attila performs his massacre so beautifully, with such a charming sense of humor, that you cannot help admiring the paradoxical feats. What but a good-humored smile will provoke in you such a prank, e. g.: “Nietzsche’s preposterous nonsense knocked the bottom out of nonsense more preposterous and far more vile”? The best part of it is the fact that the author does not attempt to convince you in anything, for neither is he convinced in the infallibility of his hypotheses. The book is a relucent gem among the recent dull and heavy works of art.

Eris: A Dramatic Allegory, by Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff (Moffatt, Yard), is, we are told on the cover, “full of vigorous enthusiasm, and embodies the philosophy of Henri Bergson,” to whom on a flyleaf the book is duly dedicated. It is in careful rhythmic blank verse; a dialogue, principally, between “Man” and “Thought,” with “Past” and “Future” now and then interrupting. The allegory is prefaced by a portrait of the author by Helleu; we trust an unfair one. A strangely bovine expression greets us from under aplumed black hat and from over shoulders and arms drawn like a Goops.Helleu made lovely things once; why this?

InEriswe find Man hurling defiance at Thought, who taunts him, “You cannot vanquish me while Life endures.” Discussion between them on this point covers some forty pages of melodious argument. Six of these (and they are consecutive) form a fairly comprehensive guide-book to a trip around the world, as Man, distracted, stops off at many well-known points seeking to escape pursuing Thought.

In Venice I spread sail with CapuletAnd plied an oar across the green lagoonsThe soft air vibrant with the minstrels’ song:I dreamed in Pisa’s woodland and the gulfOf Lerici, where once again I heardThe lyrich echo of pure Shelley’s voice.On Pæstum’s glory and on Dougga’s mountI studied metope and fluted frieze—

In Venice I spread sail with Capulet

And plied an oar across the green lagoons

The soft air vibrant with the minstrels’ song:

I dreamed in Pisa’s woodland and the gulf

Of Lerici, where once again I heard

The lyrich echo of pure Shelley’s voice.

On Pæstum’s glory and on Dougga’s mount

I studied metope and fluted frieze—

And so on. “Man” finally reaches Mount Parnassus—

The mighty throne of ZeusHides like a cloud-veiled mist within the heavens;I am so near divinity it seemsThat I could tread the pathway of the stars;

The mighty throne of Zeus

Hides like a cloud-veiled mist within the heavens;

I am so near divinity it seems

That I could tread the pathway of the stars;

but “Thought” comes hurrying along, two pages later. Man cries to him desperately:

Envelope me within the cosmic heartFreed of my separate hideous entity,Blown with the wingéd dust from whence I came!

Envelope me within the cosmic heart

Freed of my separate hideous entity,

Blown with the wingéd dust from whence I came!

They struggle together, and Man plunges over the cliff. Thought, “assuming a sudden intenser magnitude, rises out of the dust of Man” (the stage directions seem a little confused here) andshouts:

At last to conquer after æons of strife—The reeling stars man’s silent sepulchre.

At last to conquer after æons of strife—

The reeling stars man’s silent sepulchre.

There are graceful lines and pictures, occasionally a good simile. Technically the lines are too smooth, too neatly finished, each in its little five-iambic jacket. The lyrics lack singing quality. There is a tedious list, two pages, of famous ladies—Helen, Sappho, Salammbo, from Eve to the Virgin Mary—as Man cries to Past, “What woman are you in disguise?” Swinburne did this gorgeously somewhere, making each speak; but these do not—they do not even live.

Totally different is my second volume of verse—The Sea is Kind, by T. Sturge Moore (Houghton Mifflin). A letter from the publishers suggests that “like Noyes and Masefield, T. Sturge Moore may have a message to American lovers of poetry.” I am an American lover of poetry and an eager one; therefore, I was hopeful; but I am oppressed by the obligation of doing justice to the initial poem in the book, viz.:The Sea is Kind, because I cannot tell at all what it is about. Several people, by name Evarne and Plexaura, females, and Menaleas and Eucritos, males, seem to be talking high talk by the edge of the sea—about ships and storms and nymphs and kindred things. Evarne speaks at great length in rough pentameters, quoting others more obscure, if possible, than herself.

The handsome scowler smiled.Then with a royal gesture of contentAddressed our wonder.. . . . . . . .“But devastation from mine inroads stretches“Across Euphrates further than they dare.“The industrious Ninevite, the huckster grey“With watching scored tale lengthen down his wall“Beneath his hatred Median debtor’s name,“Dread me, and hang near casement, over door,“To guard each southward-facing aperture,“Rude effigies smaller than this of me.—“Charm bootless ’gainst my veering pillared dust“Which chokes each sluice in vainly watered gardens,“Dessicates the velvet prudency of roses,“And leaves green gummy tendrils like to naught“But ravelled dry and dusty ends of cord”;

The handsome scowler smiled.Then with a royal gesture of contentAddressed our wonder.

The handsome scowler smiled.

Then with a royal gesture of content

Addressed our wonder.

. . . . . . . .

“But devastation from mine inroads stretches“Across Euphrates further than they dare.“The industrious Ninevite, the huckster grey“With watching scored tale lengthen down his wall“Beneath his hatred Median debtor’s name,“Dread me, and hang near casement, over door,“To guard each southward-facing aperture,“Rude effigies smaller than this of me.—“Charm bootless ’gainst my veering pillared dust“Which chokes each sluice in vainly watered gardens,“Dessicates the velvet prudency of roses,“And leaves green gummy tendrils like to naught“But ravelled dry and dusty ends of cord”;

“But devastation from mine inroads stretches

“Across Euphrates further than they dare.

“The industrious Ninevite, the huckster grey

“With watching scored tale lengthen down his wall

“Beneath his hatred Median debtor’s name,

“Dread me, and hang near casement, over door,

“To guard each southward-facing aperture,

“Rude effigies smaller than this of me.—

“Charm bootless ’gainst my veering pillared dust

“Which chokes each sluice in vainly watered gardens,

“Dessicates the velvet prudency of roses,

“And leaves green gummy tendrils like to naught

“But ravelled dry and dusty ends of cord”;

and so on for a long, long while. It may be wonderful; I dare say it is.

The last two-thirds of the volume is taken up with short poems arranged in groups addressed to various persons—Tagore, Yeats, and Moore, among them. There is more clarity here. One discerns an autobiographic wistfulness in these stanzas entitled:A Poet in the Spring Regrets Having Wed So Late in Life.

Some things, that we shall never know,Are eloquent today,Belittling our experience, thoughWe loved and were gay:For those, whose younger hands are freeWith a body not their own,Taste delicacies of intimacyWhich we have not known.Primrose, narcissus, daffodil,In sudden April plenty,Flourish as tender fancies thrillSpouses at twenty!

Some things, that we shall never know,Are eloquent today,Belittling our experience, thoughWe loved and were gay:

Some things, that we shall never know,

Are eloquent today,

Belittling our experience, though

We loved and were gay:

For those, whose younger hands are freeWith a body not their own,Taste delicacies of intimacyWhich we have not known.

For those, whose younger hands are free

With a body not their own,

Taste delicacies of intimacy

Which we have not known.

Primrose, narcissus, daffodil,In sudden April plenty,Flourish as tender fancies thrillSpouses at twenty!

Primrose, narcissus, daffodil,

In sudden April plenty,

Flourish as tender fancies thrill

Spouses at twenty!

There seems something strangely improper about this, considering the strict propriety of the theme.

One group of two is addressed to Charles Ricketts.The Serpentbegins

Hail Pytho; thou lithe length of gleaming plates!

andThe Pantherthus:

Consider now the Panther, such a beast.

One question addressed to the Panther is:

Dost, cloyed by rich meats spicy as the south,Expose thy fevered palate to the cool,Which, like snow melting in an emperor’s mouth,Helps make excess thy life’s ironic rule?

Dost, cloyed by rich meats spicy as the south,

Expose thy fevered palate to the cool,

Which, like snow melting in an emperor’s mouth,

Helps make excess thy life’s ironic rule?

Consider now Sturge Moore, our bewilderment in trying to ascertain what you wish us to think about such things as these, and consider too a transposition of the first line of a well-known poem about a Tiger, to read, “Consider now the Tiger.”

The group to Yeats has one calledThe Phantom of a Rose. An explanatory footnote tells us that a girl returning from a ball drops a rose from her bosom and dreams that a youth, the perfect emanation of the flower, rises and invites her to dance.

She ached to rise, she yearned to speak,She strove to smile, but proved too weak;As one in quicksand neck-deep,Wild with the will, has no power to leap;Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boatLay logged with sleep, and could not float.She had danced too often at the ball,She had fluttered, nodded, and smiled too much.Tears formed in her heart: they did not fall.. . . . . . . .He rose, and danced a visible song;With rhythmic gesture he contendedAgainst her trance; and proved so strongThat the grapes of his thought wore the bloom of his mood,While her soul tasted and understood.

She ached to rise, she yearned to speak,

She strove to smile, but proved too weak;

As one in quicksand neck-deep,

Wild with the will, has no power to leap;

Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat

Lay logged with sleep, and could not float.

She had danced too often at the ball,

She had fluttered, nodded, and smiled too much.

Tears formed in her heart: they did not fall.

. . . . . . . .

He rose, and danced a visible song;With rhythmic gesture he contendedAgainst her trance; and proved so strongThat the grapes of his thought wore the bloom of his mood,While her soul tasted and understood.

He rose, and danced a visible song;

With rhythmic gesture he contended

Against her trance; and proved so strong

That the grapes of his thought wore the bloom of his mood,

While her soul tasted and understood.

“Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat.” A happy simile! We recognize the sensation.

InJudith, one of the group to Moore, a vigorous note is sounded. This is good, and maybe the rest is too; I do not know. It rolls above my head.

The Spirit of Life, a series of nine essays by Mowry Saben (Mitchell Kennerley), is the kind of book that makes me savagely controversial and then cross for heeding it at all. Its platitudinous optimism meanders along through some two hundred and fifty pages under various chapter headings: Nature, Morals, Sex, Heroes, etc. The first sentence is: “There are many great Truths that can be expressed only by means of paradox”; and the last, “If life means nothing, if the universe means nothing, then reform is only an illusory word, which has come to confuse us upon the highway of Despair; but if in our highest ideals we may find the real meaning of our personal lines, because they are the quintessence of the spiritual universe, whose avatars we should be, there is nothing too glorious for the heart of man to conceive.” All in between is just like that.

All persons, and there are many, who are determined willy nilly to believe the world a nice place; who, confronted with the unlovely, the stark, gaping and horrid, cast down their eyes exclaiming “It is not there,” will take solid comfort inThe Spirit of Life. It is like the millions of sermons droned out one day in seven all over the land to patient folk who no longer know why they come nor why they stay to hear.

But this is a review, not a diatribe—so “consider now” the Spirit.

The first essay is calledNature. It quotes freely from Peter Bell, and also reprints something about tongues in trees and sermons in stones. Turning the leaves we catch the names of Burroughs, Whitman, and Thoreau. Toward the end is this:

Everything exists for him who is great enough to envisage it. The life that now is reveals man as the crowning glory of Nature, the goal of evolution. In the end the earth does but shelter our bones, not our thoughts and aspirations.

Skipping the rest, we turn quickly toSex, hoping something from the vitality of the theme, and come to this:

To attack Sex as one of the joys of life would be foolish and deservedly futile.... I am certain that sex is a sweetener of the cup of life, but one must not therefore infer that there can never be too much sweetening, for there can be, even to the point of danger from spiritual diabetes.

Immortal phrase, “Spiritual diabetes.” Several pages of this essay are devoted to episodes in the life of insects, all pointing a painful lesson to man:

... and there are spiders doomed to be eaten by the female as soon as they have demonstrated their masculinity. Thus are we taught how little permanence is possessed by an organization which yields only the instinct of passionate desire for sex.

Here is boldness,—

I cannot indorse the ascetic ideal that holds the love of man for woman to be but a snare for the spirit. The great poetry of Dante alone is sufficient to refute so baseless a claim.

Why quote further? There are indubitably certain good things in the book, but they are by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Dante, Shakespeare, Whitman, et al.

A. M.

Modern English Literature: From Chaucer to the Present Day, by G. H. Mair. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Good histories of English literature are rare, and Mr. Mair’s book should accordingly be given a warm welcome, for it combines brevity with comprehensiveness of treatment in a very unusual manner. Mr. Mair not only writes well and knows his subject, but he seems instinctively to know what his readers will want—and he supplies it.

For instance, we do not remember that popular histories of English literature bother to tell such a detail as how the chronological order of Shakespeare’s plays is determined, but Mr. Mair’s telling of that will showthe layman just what literary scholarship means, and in conjunction with his other remarks on our knowledge of Shakespeare it will rescue the uninformed from the chance of falling into such errors as the Baconian theory.

The book, however, is not one of higher and textual criticism and chronology. It is a work of appreciation, and the appreciation is that of a modern man. It is obvious that Chaucer might be treated in a manner quite alien to the interests of the man of today who is not a scholar, but the treatment of his work which ends in joining his hands to those of Charles Dickens as workers in a kindred quest is one that is well calculated to persuade even the philistine that Chaucer is a figure of passable interest to him.

It is the mark of the live man to recognize genius, and the manner in which Mr. Mair treats the genius of that great poet, John Donne, is in vivid contrast to the way in which it is usually treated in histories of English literature. For example:

Very different ... is the closely packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest English writer of the century, though his obscurity has kept him out of general reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning’s, is more difficult to understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such similar causes that they are worth examining together. In both, as in the obscure passages in Shakespeare’s later plays, obscurity arises not because the poet says too little, but because he attempts to say too much. He huddles a new thought on the one before it, before the first has had time to express itself; he sees things or analyzes emotions so swiftly and subtly himself that he forgets the slower comprehension of his readers; he is for analyzing things far deeper than the ordinary mind commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things from a dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each separate vision in a heap out on to the page; his restless intellect finds new and subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is modeled on the average of our intelligences, find words to express them; he is always trembling on the brink of the inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning, and the comparison could be pushed farther still. Both draw the knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the bypaths of mediævalism. Browning’sSordellois obscure because he knows too much about mediæval Italian history: Donne’sAnniversarybecause he is too deeply read in mediæval scholasticism and speculation. Both make themselves more difficult to the reader who is familiar with the poetry of their contemporaries by the disconcerting freshness of their point of view. Seventeenth-century love poetry was idyllic and idealist; Donne’s is passionate and realistic to the point of cynicism. To read him after reading Browne and Johnson is to have the same shock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in thought and melodious facility in writing. They are corrective of lazy thinking and lazy composition.

Another feature in which this book differs from others of its kind is that the author is not afraid to bring the record down to the work of his contemporaries, and the struggles of Mr. Shaw with the bourgeois world, and the era opened by M. J. Synge and the Irish literary renascence, are here sympathetically dealt with.

L. J.

Love’s Legend, by Fielding Hall. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

With a somewhat overemphasized regard for purity, Fielding Hall approaches the narration of this honeymoon trip down a Burmese river. The novel—if such a dissertation on the early marriage state could be called a novel—is told in rather peculiar fashion, by the man and woman alternately, at first, and later on with the help of two more people.

The man is prone to burst forth into fairy tales to explain every point of argument to Lesbia. He tells her of a beautiful princess who was blindfolded and kept within an enclosed garden that she might never know the ways of man.

“They told her that the bandage made her see more clearly than if her eyes were free. For they had painted images upon the inside of her bandage and told her they were real.”Silence.“And she believed it. Then came a Prince. He wooed the Princess and he won her. So he took her with him out of her garden. They came into the world and passed into a forest. There they were quite alone.“Take off your bandage,” said the Prince. “Look at the world and me.”“I am afraid,” she sighed; “the world is evil.”“It is God’s world,” the Prince replied. “He lives in it.”“They told me that God lived in Heaven, far off, not here,” she answered.“They told you wrong; open and you will see.”“I will not look,” she said, “I fear the devil.”“Your beauty is all cold,” he said, “your heart beats not!”“What is a heart?” she asked.“That which gives life,” he answered; “my heart beats strongly and it longs for an answer. You have a heart as strong maybe as mine. But it is sealed. Will you not let me loose it?”“I am afraid,” she answered.“Then I will tell you what he did. He held the Princess in his arms all despite herself and tore the bandage from her eyes.”... “Did she let him do it?”“She heard his voice and all despite herself she let him do his will.”

“They told her that the bandage made her see more clearly than if her eyes were free. For they had painted images upon the inside of her bandage and told her they were real.”

Silence.

“And she believed it. Then came a Prince. He wooed the Princess and he won her. So he took her with him out of her garden. They came into the world and passed into a forest. There they were quite alone.

“Take off your bandage,” said the Prince. “Look at the world and me.”

“I am afraid,” she sighed; “the world is evil.”

“It is God’s world,” the Prince replied. “He lives in it.”

“They told me that God lived in Heaven, far off, not here,” she answered.

“They told you wrong; open and you will see.”

“I will not look,” she said, “I fear the devil.”

“Your beauty is all cold,” he said, “your heart beats not!”

“What is a heart?” she asked.

“That which gives life,” he answered; “my heart beats strongly and it longs for an answer. You have a heart as strong maybe as mine. But it is sealed. Will you not let me loose it?”

“I am afraid,” she answered.

“Then I will tell you what he did. He held the Princess in his arms all despite herself and tore the bandage from her eyes.”

... “Did she let him do it?”

“She heard his voice and all despite herself she let him do his will.”

Mr. Hall voices these inanities with the appalling conceit of one who rushes in where even the best of writers tread with circumspection. And the worst of it is, that his rash feet have carried him nowhere, except, perhaps, into a limelight that is likely to prove embarrassing.

W. T. Hollingsworth.

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