These are good lines, but it is impossible to read them without remembering and contrasting with them Shakspere's single perfectness. In a similar adaptation of Poe's 'Israfel' Mrs. Coates has been more successful. I said adaptation, when I should have said interpretation; for Mrs. Coates has done what Poe's poetic principles forbade him to do, she has moralized her song. Indeed, with all her study of the old masters the author is thoroughly modern, and in nothing more so than in her fondness for the symbolical meaning of a poetic thought. A large number of the poems in the book are applications of pleasing fancies to the actual problems of life. Poetry, whatever it may have been, is now the interpretation of life. Everything is moralized.

Yet there is occasional escape from this atmosphere. Besides the many sonnets of excellent workmanship, the numerous vers d'occasion, the captured fancy and the moralized conceit, there are some half dozen songs in this volume that ring with the simple joy of living, that sing of themselves. The musician's ear is not deceived, and at least one of them has already received admirable musical setting. Perhaps the best of them all is this:

When beeches bud and lilacs blow,

And Earth puts on her magic green;
When dogwoods bear their vernal snow
And skies grow deep the stars between,—
Then, O ye birds! awake and sing
The gladness at the heart of Spring!

When flowers blossom for the poor,
And Nature heals the hurt of years,
When wondering Love resists the cure,

Yet hopes again, and smiles through tears,—
Then, O ye birds! awake and sing
The gladness at the heart of Spring!

The best of the sonnets-one that is better at each successive reading, and grows into the heart like a treasured memory-is that entitled 'Autumn'.

AUTUMN.

"We ne'er will part!" Ah me, what plaintive sounds
Are human protests! Dear one, lift your eyes!
Behold the solemn, widespread prophecies
Of that whose shadow all our light confounds,
Of that whose being all our knowledge bounds!
Far from the faded field the robin flies,
Upon her stem the last rose droops and dies,
And through the pines a doomful blast resounds.
As dawn is portent of the day's decline,

As joy is prelude sweet to waiting sorrow,
So ripened good is Nature's harvest sign;

Love, only, the immortal strain doth borrow, And, high exalted by a hope divine,

Still whispers in the night of death,-To-morrow! Such a poem is enough to refute the Sentimentalist, a sign of promise to cheer the soul of every watcher on the heights.

HENRY MARVIN BELDEN.

The Building of the British Empire.*

This is the first of the 'Stories of the Nations' that is told in two volumes, and in the profusion and excellence of its portraits and illustrations it outdoes its predecessors. The earlier acts of the long struggle between Spaniard and Anglo-Saxon, which occupy a large portion of the first volume are of special interest at present. Americans as well as Britons can feel a pardonable pride in the splendid hardihood of their common ancestors, the Elizabethan vikings who harried the ships and ports of Spain in the zenith of her power.

Mr. Story's theme has not required him to write a connected history, but only to describe the factors which conduced to the making of the vastest empire known to historians. apparent and proper aim has been to note all these factors and to assign to each its due proportion. To say that he has not entirely achieved his purpose is no reflection on the interest of his work. The landmarks in the national advance in strength and dominion are sketched in bold, but not too bold, relief-the foundation of the East India Company, the Revolution of 1688, the legislative union with Scotland, the acquisition of Australia, the crucial victories of Marlborough, Wolfe, Clive, Wellington and Nelson. Due prominence is also given to industrial and moral victories; to the planting of the various colonies and the later policy of allowing them a free hand (a policy taught by bitter experience); to the ever growing religious tolerance of Britain; to the intolerance of continental nations, which, at different periods, drove their skilled artisans to practise their trades in England; to the modern spread of education; to the consummation of liberty, both personal and industrial. Another merit in Mr. Story's treatment of his subject is that he insists on attributing the greatness of England more to her people than to her statesmen and commanders. It certainly was her private soldiers and seamen who gained most of her victories in the period covered by Mr. Story's narrative. So in earlier centuries it was her archers who won Crecy and Agincourt. It was their

"Barbed points that scratched the name
Of England on the walls of fame."

At the same time Mr. Story duly acknowledges the contributions to the development of the empire made by certain worthies, notably Queens Elizabeth and Victoria, Drake, Blake, and Nelson, Cooke and other explorers,

*The Building of the British Empire: The Story of England's Growth from Elizabeth to Victoria.' By Alfred Thomas Story. In two parts (1558-1688 and 1689-1895). New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Clive and Warren Hastings, Cobden and Peel, Sir George Grey and Sir Henry Parkes-the tribute in some instances being tempered by just moral criticism.

But the writer of these volumes has underrated the potency of the wise counsels of Elizabethan and other statesmen, and the decisive energy of such men as Cromwell, Pitt, and Palmerston. Mr. Story has also ignored the bracing effect of the splendid patriotic literature of Britain. Shakspere's fervid tribute to the "sceptred isle" has nerved many hearts to acts of heroism, and there are passages which thrill the national pride almost as much in the works of other poets from Spenser to Kipling. And surely the many political sages of Britain, from Bacon with his wise letter to King James "on the true greatness of Great Britain" down to Adam Smith and Bentham and Mill and Spencer, have had some influence, worth a brief mention, in moulding the legislation and securing the welfare of the empire. No credit is given to the emigration of the United Empire Loyalists to Canada; and not a line to the modern propaganda of the Imperial Federation League and its legitimate successors. And yet many thinkers are convinced that the security of the empire will depend upon its consolidation.

In his two chapters on the struggle between France and England for supremacy in North America Mr. Story has not once quoted or referred to Parkman, whose histories he does not seem to have read. Had he done so, he could hardly have made such a slip (if it be the author's) as occurs on page 236 of his first volume. "Champlain established (at Port Royal, Acadie,) an order which was designated as the 'Lord de bon temps.' L'ordre is, of course, the true reading. And there are other typographic blunders in French words, such as Fountainebleau, peoples (for peuples), etc. Whether by accident or design D'Estournelle (who succeeded that luckless admiral the Duc d'Anville) and Dupleix of Indian fame are unconventionally spelt Distournel and Duplaix. On p. 337 of the second volume Western Australia is stated to be "upwards of nine hundred (evidently a misprint for nineteen) times the size of England." Yet, notwithstanding these superficial errors and the omissions before alluded to, the usually sound conclusions of the author and his intelligent grouping of events, added to the interest of the subject and the profuse illustrations, make these volumes a valuable addition to the 'Stories of the Nations.'

There are those who fear that the zenith of Britain's greatness has been reached and that decline must soon follow. But may not the British outlast other empires as the banyan outlasts other trees? For Britain, like the ban

yan, roots its branches in the earth, and these branches may, like the banyan's, form new supporting stems which may relieve the parent stem of a portion of the superincumbent weight. The hope of Britain lies partly in federation, that is to say in inducing her dependent children to become her partners, and partly in gaining the support of her independent child in the civilizing mission which has apparently been entrusted by Providence to our dominating race. And of late there are unmistakable signs that mutual self-defence require a burying of miserable jealousies and a rapprochement or alliance between the mother country and her once estranged daughter. "Such a confederation of the British possessions", to repeat some sentences of mine printed years ago, "could dare any European combination. With the alliance of its sister AngloSaxon power, it could smile at the jealousy of other great nations and their tardy longings for colonial empire. 'Why', we might then complacently ask, with the self-righteousness of our race, 'do the heathen so furiously rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing? Why do the kings of the earth stand up and the rulers take counsel together to break our bonds asunder? Know they not that we are given the heathen for our inheritance and the utmost parts of the earth for our possession?""> F. BLAKE CROFTON.

Good and Evil.*

Heterogeneous seemingly the subjects treated in this book have a subtle connection and admit to us an understanding of Professor Royce's psychology and metaphysic. The chapter entitled "The Problem of Job' is a vigorous rejection of pious obscurantism. The philosophical idealism of the writer is here plainly intimated. The sufferings of Job are not cruel, for they are the sufferings of God, the absolute Being, of whom Job is a part. God's life can arrive at no perfection without "woe, evil, tragedy". "The eternal world contains Gethsemane." This absolute oneness of God with the sufferer would seem to many both Brahmanistic and a kind of patripassianism. According to the writer, we are "fragments of the absolute life," or, rather, "partial functions in the unity of the absolute and conscious process of the world".

Professor Royce's study of John Bunyan reveals a keen insight into pathological states of consciousness. The portrait of Bunyan, after

*Studies of Good and Evil'. By Josiah Royce, Professor of the History of Philosophy in Harvard University. New York: D. Appleton and Company,

1898.

all psychological deductions, exalts his character and reveals a just and generous sympathy on the part of our author.

In another chapter, Professor Royce considers moral goodness as something else than ignorance of evil. As physical life in its phenomena involves the essential phenomena of the death of tissues, so moral life is a triumph over sinful inclinations. To be morally wise means to be acquainted with impurity. No true freedom can exist without contest with evil, internal and external, and achievement of self-restraint. One must know the evil motive in order to choose the good motive, but to know evil is not to become evil. The author here coasts warily along the reefs of paradox, and seems at times to intimate that to be a great saint we must have been a great sinner. Vigorously defending man's power of choice and personal freedom, the writer's theory of the absolute yet seems to engulf human freedom. A close parallelism exists between intellectual and moral functions according to Professor Royce. As we think in order to grow wiser and as thinking implies ignorance, so moral progress depends upon prior moral defects. But sin is no element of a good life.

The chapters entitled 'Implications of Self Consciousness', and 'Consciousness and Nature' are very valuable, as giving us intimation of the author's epistemology and psychology. The logic is subtle by which the bridge is thrown over to knowledge of Nature by means of the knowledge of the physical bodies of others. We can hardly accept the conclusion that because the finite cannot exhaustively know its own nature there can be but one existent Person, the complete (absolute) Self. This is too severely Brahmanistic. It is, however, a valuable contribution to psychology, to bridge over the chasm between the self and the world by help of the social consciousness.

Professor Royce is an acute logician and possesses an admirable power of clear statement. The clear stream of his argument flows on with the grace which characterizes the style of Matthew Arnold, and like the latter he is not careful to condense what might have been more tersely expressed. No criticism of Professor Royce's metaphysics can be here attempted. His conception of God, or the Absolute, seems to the present writer to be an inadequate one. It is not always easy to seize the clue, at all times, in the dedalous reasoning. This may be attributed to lack of philosophical insight or impotence of mind on the part of the reader. But one may think, that in following the path of the author, so many paths diverge from it, rightward and

leftward, that one may be lured away and be hopelessly lost in the maze, or by striking

some track arrive at a conclusion hostile to the main contention. To be forced to accept the author's idealism, at the risk of being regarded as an incompetent reasoner, would be equivalent to saying that his theory is absolutely convincing, and that they who cannot accept his theory of the absolute are vassals to antiquated or non-reflective modes of thought, which the author in one passage frankly intimates.

These essays will be read with great interest, as everything from Professor Royce's pen challenges attention and admiration, if not unqualified assent.

CHARLES MELLEN TYLER.

The Everglades.*

It seems strange that in this year of grace 1898, a considerable portion of one of our Atlantic coast states should still practically remain terra incognita. Yet in the southern portion of Florida a district about one hundred and thirty miles long and seventy miles wide has remained unknown or been only slightly revealed by the visits of three travelers-by Major Williams in 1883, by Mr. Ingraham in 1892, and by Lieutenant Willoughby in 1897.

'Across the Everglades' is therefore a welcome addition to geographical literature, and will certainly change all popular conceptions of the southern part of Florida. The very word "glades" has been suggestive of a thick forest, growing out of foul swampy land. Instead of that, Mr. Willoughby's journey shows that the Everglades are covered with a waving crop of long thick grass, mainly saw grass, and that the land must most justly be described as water. The bottom seems to be generally limestone rock, which is sometimes covered by a foot or more of mud. Over this is a layer of water, from a few inches to five or six feet in depth. This water is not swampy in its nature, but has a distinct movement east and west from a sort of rock ridge near the middle of the Glades. It is perfectly fresh and can be drunk with impunity, and its mass is so great that it cannot be accounted for by the rains alone but it must in all probability come mainly from below through springs.

The first sign of a good traveler is the selection of his outfit: one from which the maximum of comfort and scientific result may be obtained with the minimum of weight and bulk. Mr. Willoughby had all the qualifications of the genuine explorer and his chapter on out

Across the Everglades. A Canoe Journey of Exploration.' By Hugh L. Willoughby. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company.

fit is not the least interesting of the book. With only one companion, Mr. Edward Brewer, Mr. Willoughby set out in a canoe on his journey of exploration through the Everglades. Everywhere the saw grass with its saw-like edges, sharp enough to cut through a rubber boot, opposed a formidable barrier to their advance; their paddles were useless among the masses of it, and only by poling from the stern could they divide the grass and impel the canoe forward.

Mr. Willoughby made many notes about the fauna of Southern Florida. In most parts of the Everglades proper, mosquitoes were almost absent, as there was no harbor for them from the wind but the long grass, and the water was not stagnant for their larvae. Snakes on the contrary abounded, especially the moccasin, and these were a genuine danger, from which the travelers had narrow escapes. Everglades he shot several specimens of the Florida crocodile, the largest thirteen feet in length. Readers will find his account of this little known reptile very interesting.

Near the

Man in the Everglades is represented by the Seminole Indians, whom the author describes as a peaceable and truthful race, whose great desire is to be left alone by the "lying white man", as they disrespectfully term us. Since the conclusion of the agreement between the United States government and the Seminoles that so long as they let the whites alone they should not be disturbed, the Indians have faithfully kept their compact, and their one fear is that the white man will not keep his part and that they will be transported to a Western Reservation. Let us hope that no such abuse of power may occur.

'Across the Everglades' is certainly a very readable book containing much new information, and Mr. Willoughby may be congratulated on the volume as well as for the plan and execution of his most successful journey.

EDWIN SWIFT BALCH.

A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread-and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

One moment is annihilation's waste
One moment of the well of life to taste-
The stars are setting and the caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing,-Oh make haste!
Omar Khayyam.

Virtue giveth a man heart and piety bringeth a nobler cheerfulness and courage; if a man hath health and substance whereby to live, then can he challenge the foremost among men. No delight is wanting to life, if distempers and desperate poverty hold aloof. The rich man hath his great cravings, as the humble hath his humbler. Plenty in all things bringeth no delight to mortals; they ever strive to overtake that which fleeth away.-Bacchylides.

Book Notes.

"The Girl at Cobhurst', by Frank R. Stockton, is a very pretty love-story told with all the ingenuity and charm which Mr. Stockton has taught his readers to expect. It may not, indeed, be very profitable to learn about Cobhurst', how it was "run ramshackle", and how there came to be other persons there beside "The Girl", but it gives pleasure, which is Mr. Stockton's aim. In the handling of plot and character Mr. Stockton is very like Dickens, though he here treats very different social material. In the phrase of the Irish-negro, Mike-an essentially Stocktonian creation-it is "a lot of very nice people, some rich and some poor, and some queer and some not so queer, that lives in and around Thorbury." They are mostly well-bred and quite attractive "carriage folk", who belong to country clubs, and know how, on occasion, to be "technically" not at home. Some of them are even fortunate enough to be favored with the ministrations of cooks who are "artists", and if, occasionally, the servants do claim the right "to eat with the family" it is only under quite exceptional conditions. By no means the least attractive of the characters are Dr. Tolbridge, who has ideas concerning "cropsticks of flamingo" and a happy manner of prescribing for young persons losing their "milk minds"; and that other estimable practitioner, Miss Panney, who has such a "one-er" in consistency in trusting and following the long established principles of "Panneyopathy."

Mr. Stockton was born in the year 1834, and "The Girl at Cobhurst' is the thirty-third volume he has issued since 1870, yet it shows no lack of fresh and youthful spirit, and if the humor is, perhaps, more dry and sedate than that in the author's earlier volumes, for that it is only the more characteristic and delightful. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.)

In his new book, The Open Boat, and Other Tales of Adventure', Mr. Stephen Crane has demonstrated his ability to paint impressionist pictures of other scenes than those of the American Civil War. He loves to delineate humanity facing death or in imminent peril, whether real or imaginary, to show how great and yet how small a thing is this common human nature of ours. In 'The Open Boat' it is death by drowning which the shipwrecked mencaptain, correspondent, cook, and oiler-stare at stolidly against a background of slate-colored waves with snarling crests. Mr. Crane has no difficulty in making one see, as well as feel, a trying situation. The other sea story, 'Flanagan', a description of a filibustering expedition to Cuba, is of much present interest, being a living picture of one of the causes that have resulted in the Spanish-American war. To go into a thing of that sort "for fun" is no uncommon practice in "these States." Of the Mexican sketches, A Man and Some Others' and 'One Dash-Horses', are better than "The Wise Men', 'Death and the Child', and "The Five White Mice'. All are strong in description, but the last three are a trifle incoherent. Not so 'The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky', a rare bit of local color. The author does not appear to have made any long stride in advance since he startled the world with "The Red Badge of Courage' two or three years ago. He struck a note then that responded eloquently to his touch and he has not roamed far from it yet. Strong and vivid within a certain range, he has his limitations, but better a melody in one octave than an aimless wandering over the keys with no definite result. (New York: Doubleday and McClure.)

'Dreamers of the Ghetto', by Israel Zangwill, is a book not inferior in interest to the writer's earlier Jewish studies. We are told in the preface that the sketches form a chronicle of Dreamers who have arisen in the Ghetto, "from its establishment in the sixteenth century to its slow breaking-up in our own day." Those who have read "The Master' and 'Children of the Ghetto', will recognize in this latest work, the same glowing imagery, and marvellous acquaintance with the crannies of the human heart, that have made Zangwill so strongly attractive to a world ever seeking some new thing.

The first sketch, A Child of the Ghetto', is a type of these Jewish dreams. The child is born in the Ghetto of Venice and lives the intense, narrow, religious life of his people. But a day comes when he wanders into the city beyond, and the golden wonder of St. Mark's stirs his soul, while the "other prayers of other people" make him dimly distrustful that Moses and the Prophets have told all the truth.

Jewish philosophy, poetry, and statesmanship are represented in Spinoza, Heine, and Disraeli, with whose dreams fancy takes graceful liberties. We rejoice when Spinoza's love comes to naught, for the "maker of lenses" would not get the proper focus for domestic duties. Heine's awful death-in-life is hardly lightened by his wit-there is a suggestion of the death-rattle in his very laughter. Brilliant, blasphemous and scathing, as are his last flashes of life, we are ready to echo his own saying: "It is, after all, so much better to be stupid, and walk in the old laid-out, well-trimmed paths." In the Primrose Sphinx', we find the wonderful Hebrew diplomatist who had the "politic perseverance to be more English than the English." Zangwill's fondness for dramatic situations is shown in the description of Disraeli seated in his "knightly stall", listening unflinchingly to the discourse of the country parson. The glitter of Beaconsfield's own Orientalism is in Zangwill's sketch; but, in spite of its too-apparent cleverness, there is so keen a love of life and beauty that we feel that the writer's words about the Primrose Sphinx are true of himself also. "He feels the tragedy of vanished Rome, the marble appeal of ancient Athens."

Some of the tales are too intensely Judaic-the dust of Rabbinical lore seems to have settled thickly on 'The Master of the Name' and 'The People's Savior'. But the reading world is in Zangwill's debt for these wonderfully real pictures of a life so strange to the modern Western world.

We turn to Joseph, the Dreamer' for the writer's best work. Joseph is a more deeply spiritual Matthew Strong, who revolts against the hardness of the Hebrew ritual; but, in the Roman Christendom of his day, he is equally revolted by the licence and luxury of those who profess to be followers of Jesus. His burning censure of the worldly Pope, which might have come from the lips of a Savonarola, brings upon him a shameful death. At his grave, meet a noble Pagan maiden and the gentle Jewess, Miriam,types of womanhood that recall the witchery of Eleanor and the constancy of Ruth Hailey,―neither of whom would have satisfied either Master or Dreamer. The close of the tale is sombre in the extreme, but the dream of Joseph, the agony of his crucifixion of the flesh, and his unfaltering sacrifice, are nobler than Heine's dying mockery:-"I could have died to save humanity, if I did not at the same time suspect that humanity was not worth the saving." The dreams that have come to the great ones of the Ghetto may well give us pause. But we fear there is no Daniel in Philistia to give the interpretation thereof. (New York: Harper and Brothers.)

F. Hopkinson Smith's 'Caleb West, Master Diver', is the longest, the most ambitious, and, on the whole, the most effective of that author's stories. It is his first attempt to give in a single book literary expression to the manysidedness that he has been successful in attaining in his personality. Yet in it Mr. Smith gives testimony, as Mr. Kipling and Mr. Richard Harding Davis have done before him, to the fact that it is not easy to develop from a writer of short stories into a novelist. 'A Gentle man Vagabond' and 'Colonel Carter of Cartersville' were written from the point of view of a goodhumored, luxurious, not too serious man of the world. "Tom Grogan' was told by Mr. Smith, the lighthouse builder, the man of affairs, the keen student of men and women. 'Caleb West', drawing from these and other sources, combines into an unhomogeneous long story material which might have served for several short ones. Around the first of these, which might be called 'The Building of Shark Ledge Light', by the author of Tom Grogan', are grouped The Awakening of Betty', by the same author, 'His Sweetheart Helpmate', by the author of 'Colonel Carter', and, finally, The Only Way', by F. Hopkinson Smith, "novelist."

Decidedly the best character in the book is our old friend 'Cap'n Joe', who, as readers of Mr. Smith's stories will recall, saved the lives of the passengers on the sinking ferry-boat near Hoboken by calking, with his own body, the gash left in her side by a colliding tug, and was so modest about it afterward. Drawn now more fully, he is the engineer's righthand man in building the light, and, with Aunty Bell, his wife, wields a genial, though firm, dictatorship over the Keyport community. Cap'n Joe, as a character creation, is worthy to rank with Colonel Carter.

The same is not to be said of Caleb West, the master diver, who has opportunity to be only negatively strong in a weakly conventional entanglement with his girl-wife Betty and her lay figure lover Bill Lacey.

The pleasant enough love story of Helen Shirley and Jack Hardy is fill-up material. There is also true of the hazardous reintroduction to the public of Major Tom Slocomb, of Pocomoke, Maryland, the 'Gentleman Vagabond', who now appears in the role of Miss Shirley's protecting uncle. This reintroduction is to be regretted because it was impossible to improve the original drawing of the character, which now lacks its former perfect finish and keeping, because too much is made of it. And now and then we tremble at the encroachments made by Major Slocomb upon the peculiar domain of Colonel Carter. The relation existing between Henry Sanford, the lighthouse engineer, and Mrs. Leroy, whose husband has for years been coming home when he gets through at Paris, is drawn with a force and delicacy Mr. Smith has seldom equaled, and in Kate Leroy he has pictured a type of noble womanhood which is full of promise for him as a novelist in making. Whether the promise will be fulfilled and the metamorphosis completed it remains for the author's succeeding volumes to show. Mr. Smith will not ob'tain true objectivity in his work until he abandons the semi-autobiographical figure who has hitherto appeared as the narrator of his stories. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company.)

The little volume entitled 'War' contains nine, presumably true, Tales from McClure's' by American soldiers with whom the sword is evidently mightier than the pen. (New York: Doubleday and McClure.)