which follows somewhat closely actual records of history, than in verse which pursues imaginative flights. Mr. Story has gained celebrity as a sculptor, and his bold advances upon the theater of literature, to say nothing of this last sally upon the literary theater, lays him open to the strict criticism any one must await, who, not content with the laurels of his own special art, makes a strong push for those of another.

His first volume of poetry was certainly novice work of the most superficial kind, in spite of a pleasing ease of versification, which testified that the author was, in his way, a careful workman. Here and there was a graceful stanza, like "In the East:"

"Drop a rosebud from the grating, Just at twilight, love, Underneath I shall be waiting,

And will glance above;

If you hear a whistle answer,
Áll below is right,

Drop into my arms, we'll vanish
Far into the night."

In "Graffiti d'Italia," which appeared in 1868, Mr. Story sang of the only land which would seem capable of satisfying his poetical nature, and also with a stronger voice and a better method. A painful and even meager following in Robert Browning's footsteps was still very apparent,-a following singularly unfortunate, because the two men are totally dissimilar, whatever be the ratio of talent or genius in which they stand to each other. "Padre Bandelli," "Leonardo da Vinci," "A Primitive Christian in Rome," and the separately printed "Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem," are all Browning with Browning omitted. The latter might project himself into the subjectivity of Leonardo, and would probably remain a good deal himself, but he would not leave us with the impression that the great Leonardo was a snob. That is the impression, however, which Mr. Story leaves, and having said that, it would not be polite to say that Mr. Story does project himself into the place of Leonardo. Of the "Graffiti," Cleopatra is the poem which called out most remark, owing to a certain unwholesome vigor in it, and the novelty of finding the transmigration of souls done into verse. Cleopatra the tigress and Antony the tiger in far-off ages, when their souls were still in the bodies of beasts-there was bold sensationalism! But the meter is quite unfitted to give the desired impression of horror, while of passion, which was supposed to be the chief point, the poem has not a whit. Let any one turn from the really great poets to "Cleopatra," and he will understand the tawdriness of this unnecessary poem. Another in the same volume is chiefly remarkable for its likeness in meter to the fresh, manly poem of Uhland with the refrain: "Ich bin der Knab' vom Berge," and for its silliness. Mr. Story's refrain is: "I am the poor Chiffonier." Much truer of sound, because more suited to the writer's caliber are "Persica," ," "Pan in Love," "Giannone," while now and then we stumble on a good bit of description.

"O'er yellow sunburnt slopes the olives gray, Casting their rounded shadows: far away A stately parliament of poised stone-pines; Dark cypresses with golden balls bestrewn, Each rocking to the breeze its solemn cone; Dim mountains, vailed in dreamy mystery, Sleeping upon the pale and tender sky;

And near, with softened shades of purple brown,
By distance hushed, the peaceful mellowed town,
Domes, roofs, and towers all sleeping tranced and still-
A painted city on a painted hill.'

But, as before said, Mr. Story is a better playwright than a poet, and the friends who have faith in him should encourage this vein. Interest may be said to be fairly sustained through "Nero," though it would be hard to say how much is due to the author, and how much to the painful fascination which a long array of poisonings, stabbings, matricides and unholy loves exercises upon the mind of the most cold-blooded. Indeed, it is a serious question whether such events, unrelieved by contrast with any heroic natures, ought to form the staple of a tragedy; whether these should not necessarily form a minority in order to gain adequate effect by contrast upon the minds of the audience. But, in any case, Mr. Story is not thereto "erwachsen," as the Germans say; he is not tall enough. His careful line becomes bald, his tasteful restraint dull, his happy simile trivial. The following is an unusually good

Otho is nothing but a colorless shadow; Poppaa is more sinned against than sinning; Seneca is dry and vapid, Nero himself rather aimless in character; only Agrippina stands out sharply. Perhaps the play goes over too much ground to be called a work of art; it is rather a historical novel-Mr. Story would say an historical novel-put into smooth acts and scenes. There are several noticeable carelessnesses, like "laid abed," page 74; "gauge" for "gage. On the whole, the play lacks living quality; we feel ourselves in the presence of something that has been evolved because it is the correct thing to be expected of a man of genius in the land of the many-sided Michael Angelo, not before a work of art which is the result of an imperious demand for expression.

years true to "faith in the steadfast service, content with tardy achievement."

Those readers who turn Horace's comparison into a synonym, using his ut pictura poesis for a scant definition, and ask of poetry only that it shall please, will accept many of these pieces as written for their delight. For them, the "Iris" flashes with words that are hues-the "Cupido" mocks and sports like Anacreon turned elf. The deep meaning of the graver poems is hidden under a picturesque surface. They range over a world of landscape, and borrow, for their grace of form, manifold effects from sun, and cloud, and color. As copies of outward nature when she touches only the physical sense, there are lines suffused as deeply as any of Thomson's are with the languor of summer, spring's flush, or the dimness of autumn gray. For the mere superficial effect of finish and lively clearness, such poems as "The Accolade," "Run Wild," and "Napoleon in Gotha," would be remarkable, had they no other fine quality.

But description, even the most faithful, or narrative as life-like as it may be drawn, goes a very little way toward satisfying the ideal of poetry in our time. We banish the first to the novel, and let the newspapers take care of the last. To meet the want of the modern mind in poetry, as in religion, there must be an answer to intense consciousness. It rejects dictation from the one, and scorns amusement through the other, while it cries for help from both. Is this condition imposed on modern poetry, that it shall be introspective, a limitation? Rightly considered, it is an immense extension of its range. It opens a new world. It bids poetry find its realities in the inner life, while reserving all the outward shows of form, and color, and movement, which were once its kingdom, to yield now its illustration, and frame-work, and suggestion. Of course, under this new condition, as under the older, narrower one, as the power is so will the work be. There are poets of simple emotion, poets of the passions, poets of metaphysics and mystery, some who deal with common individual life, and others bold and strong enough to attack questions as old as humanity, the conflicting answers to which hitherto given by religion and science are alike unsatisfactory. And as there are differences of power and treatment among the workers, so there are differences among the readers for whom the work is done, of tastes and preferences. In the older time there were those, the many, who only asked and only understood copies of nature; and there were those, the few, who were content with nothing less than that selected and perfected nature which is expressed in Art. So, in the newer time, the many, who give popularity, find most pleasure in the portrayal of a man's inner life as it is; while the few lay on their poet the difficult, the almost impossible task of shadowing out the life of man as a whole, as it ought to be and as it will be.

The present volume contains instances of Mr. Taylor's best performance, both in the more restricted and in the larger range we have indicated, together with some others, as the Odes, intermedi

ate in scope. Several of the Ballads are written in a strain of which he may be said to have first struck the key-note, in this country at least, in the "Quaker Widow," published several years ago. A chorus of versifiers has since caught up and echoed it with various degrees of force or feebleness. In resuming this class of homely-they might almost be called homestead-subjects, with a finer and more studied touch, our author has shown his followers its limitations, and redeemed it from their caricature. His pictures rise in a fortunate atmosphere. With the elements of quiet landscape, placid manners, ancestral trace and native thrift, he has created a series of little home-dramas, half idyllic, half domestic, and wholly human, which recall in their motive some of Wordsworth's pastoral passages freed from their triviality. If Mr. Taylor cares first for popularity, the way to it is open for him by this path. But we mistake the lesson of this book, if he would be content to sacrifice for that more serious aims. Something higher than the cheap applause of the many, he has won in the three noble Odes that conclude the volume. We have called these intermediate in degree in the classification sketched above, because their subject, though nominally personal, is not the individual, but the multitude-something more than the life of the one, something less than the life of the race. They touch not on single hopes and sorrows, but on the great themes common to all-of fame, and art, and patriotism. Life's achievement,

not its mystery, is their burden. Mr. Taylor has wrought out this difficult species of composition, by using a splendor of language and boldness of ideas to build the lofty rhyme, equal to those of any of his compeers whom our recent history has challenged to attempt similar themes.

It is easy to imagine that our author, in rising from this treatment of special subjects to the more general range of thought expressed in his Pastorals and in some of the Lyrics, may have begun by asking himself the question, How in our day and land may a poet be at once thoroughly national and thoroughly original? and the answer suggests itself as readilythat there can be no such thing as a national poet. A national laureate, a singer for state occasions, a maker of pæans, there may be, but a national poet is a contradiction in terms. A poet is the priest of a larger church than his own nation-the vates is seer as well as bard. What he takes or what his countrymen take from race, either of duty or quality, is the smallest part of what they inherit from all forefathers since man began to be. The poet who would be true to his vocation and yet serve his nation-of which he is a leader as assuredly, though not as officially as a statesman is-will not merely glorify its beliefs or forecast its greatness. He is the interpreter to his people of the voice of all the world in all time, and his function is to amend their life into reconcilement with the true life and the highest aims of humanity. To express this function in clear detail within our limits is impossible. We may best learn from our author's own words, taken almost at random, whether such a purpose and effort are not shadowed in lines like these:

"And sigh, lamenting the law reversed of the races, Starting the world afresh, on the basis unlovely of Labor." "Seeing the sternness of life, but alas! overlooking its graces." "We, whose tenderest tendrils Shoot unsupported and wither, for want of a Past we can cling to,

We, so starved in the Present, so weary of singing the Future."

"Each insists he is free, inasmuch as his bondage is willing." "In our mills of common thought,

By the pattern all is wrought; In our school of life the man

Drills to suit the public plan."

We have hardly space to commend as it deserves the skillful modulation noticeable in this as in most of Mr. Taylor's recent metrical work, and particularly his use of the hexameter. Spite of the objections to that un-English measure, we must admire its fitness as employed by him for the burden of continuous elaborated thought. His many felicitics of expression, too, we are compelled to pass by, noting only such instances as:

"Blue with hill over hill, that sink as the pausing of music;" "Truth as it shines in the sky, not truth as it shines in their lantern :"

and, in a very different order of ideas,

"The whittled Presbyterian steeple."

Each of the three Pastorals takes its tone and ornament from one of the Seasons. The field is but opened, the months are twelve,-and we shall remain unsatisfied until their full circle shall have yielded its fruit to the poet.

Thompson's "Hoosier Mosaics." * TEN years ago the life of the great Mississippi Valley and the farther West had cast hardly a single shadow in American literature. Now the California miner, the Mississippi steamboat-man, and the hardshell preacher sit down in the kingdom of literature alongside the consecrated New England deacons and the venerable North River Knickerbockers. In Mr. Maurice Thompson, the invading Goths from over the mountains have a promising accession. What the French would call his paysage-his description of visible nature-is well-nigh perfect. The ugly features—the dank swamps reeking with miasm, the mud, the croaking frogs, the hooting owls, the raw-boned, guffawing, ague-shaken rustics, are all here; and the other side-the waving maples, relieved by oaks and sycamores, the green grass, and abounding wild flowers, the blue-birds, and pee-wees, the fresh, soft winds, and the quaint old village houses are given with a genuine pre-Raphaelite love of truth and detail. The present writer has seen and heard them all; has shaken hands with these very Hoosiers in half the counties in Indiana. The dialect is in the main correct; in only one or two cases does the dialect of New England, learned from books, intrude into the speech of the Hoosier rustics, whom Mr. Thompson has evidently known and studied. In only one place have we found a

*Hoosier Mosaics. By Maurice Thompson. New York: E. J. Hale & Sons.

Hoosier saying "hev" for have, and this was no doubt a slip. When practice and the maturity of his powers shall have given Mr. Thompson more self-reliance and a consequent mastery of plot and passion equal to his mastery of scenery, he will do even better work than this. His people are genuine people, studied from life-their passions and actions are somewhat unreal and romantic, learned out of books. There is just a faint flavor of Mr. Bret Harte in some of the stories.

Mr. Thompson has made a very readable book in this first unambitious venture, but we hope that he is as yet only trying his wings. Let him go on as he has begun, studying closely and sympathetically the real men and women around him; let him tell of happenings as he sees them, and not as he reads them, and he will give us something better than he has yet essayed.

Phelps's "Teacher's Hand-Book." *

THE existence of a volume like this is very signifi. cant, as showing to what an extent teaching is already recognized as a distinct business, with technical terms and professional ways of its own. Not many years ago it was supposed that any one of average information and capacity was able to teach, and the work of teaching was assumed only as a temporary employment, which could be taken up and laid down at pleasure or necessity. But no one can examine this book without becoming convinced that such is no longer the case. In fact no one but a professional teacher will be able to read it with much profit. Any one else might as well take up a med. ical journal for amusing or profitable reading. A large part of it is composed of abstracts, or rather analyses, of what the pupils in a normal school are accustomed to call "teaching exercises," and are to them intelligible, and to them only. For example, when we read as follows: "DIVISION-a fraction by an integer: (a) Dividing the numerator, (b) multiplying the denominator, (c) refer to principles 3 and 4 for deriving the rule," we perceive at once that we are in the atmosphere of a professional work-shop. Thus the book must be judged by its value to those who have in charge pupils, either of mature or youthful minds. Its author is evidently a man of long and varied experience in his profession, possessed of great enthusiasm, and inspired by a noble purpose. Living in a section of country where the population, except in the large cities, is sparse, and where the teachers of country schools have too often to depend for their only professional training on the Teachers' Institutes; brought into daily contact, moreover, with large numbers of minds fresh from the effect of teaching in the country schools,-full of the abounding, broad, vigorous, and self-criticising life of the West,-he brings here the fruit of many years' experience, of many years His very quoconcientiously devoted to one work. tations, the very authors from whom he draws his

* The Teacher's Hand-Book for the Institute and the ClassRoom. By William F. Phelps, M. A., Principal of the State Normal School, Winona, Minn. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co.

illustrations, show how he has grown into the habit of turning all he reads or does into the one allabsorbing current of his daily work. It is impossible not to recognize that he knows whereof he speaks; that he is giving us, not sketches of theoretical lessons, but plans which he has himself worked out and put in practice in even the most elementary departments of the most elementary studies.

As the former heterogeneous methods of teaching become more the object of thought and more organized, the danger lies in too much formalizing in lessons, in too much machinery in discipline. The volume under consideration has not steered clear of this danger. In the hands of their author, the sketches of lessons' would doubtless prove satisfactory. Placed in the hands of a young and inexperienced teacher, they would tend to make him a copyist, and hence spoil him, while every experienced teacher has his own methods, which are to and for him of more value.

Many of our best teachers would differ strongly with the author in some of the classifications given under Grammar, especially those of the verb, p. 192. What our schools need in grammar is not a multiplication but a reduction of the number of terms, a simple philosophical consideration of the English language from the point of view of comparative grammar. The chapters on School Legislation seem the most valuable part of the book to all interested in statistics. The fault of the volume is the too great running into details and exact programmes of work, the very exactness of which, in other places, will destroy their original value; its merit, that of being an earnest and honest effort by a prominent and experienced teacher to raise the standard of his profession. The book is well printed. Its purchasers may possibly object to paying for 61 pp. of advertisements at the end.

Stillman's "Poetic Localities of Cambridge."

WHAT Mrs. Greatorex has been doing for New York so diligently, and with so much sympathy, in her recent pleasant series of etchings (published by the Putnams), Mr. Stillman has now done in a mellower, more artistic way for Cambridge. Both these undertakings are the fruit of a recently developed feeling for landmarks among us. "I don't quite understand Mr. Ruskin's saying (if he said it), that he couldn't get along in a country where there were no castles, but I do think we lose a great deal in living where there are so few permanent homes," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the passage which Mr. Stillman has selected to accompany his heliotype of the old Holmes house. And many a lover of association will agree with him. Yet Cambridge is peculiarly blessed in the matter of ancient houses, splendid enough in style to wear their antiquity proudly for many a decade to come; and these mansions nearly all have the

Poetic Localities of Cambridge. Edited by W. J. Stillman. Illustrated with Heliotypes from Nature. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1876.

charm of some great name in literature attached to them. In addition to excellent views of these, Mr. Stillman presents exquisite glimpses of Beaver Brook, Mr. Lowell's Willows, the Waverley Oaks, the Washington Elm, and other equally noteworthy objects. There are twelve of these Cambridge scenes, and it is hard to choose between them. The heliotype combines the truth of photography with a prevailing softness of tone somewhere between sepia-drawing and mezzotint engraving. Next to actual drawings from a scene (which, however, involve so much inaccuracy unless done by a master, and in that case become so expensive), nothing could be more admirable than these views. They give us the places in a form worthy of the associations that belong to them, and make the volume one which will be cherished by many readers of the Cambridge poets.

Russell's "Library Notes." *

A LITERARY miscellany cast into minute component parts is always agreeable reading, if the collector have taste and a wide culture. The library notes Mr. Russell has made for our delectation have nothing pretentious about them, except the headings under which they are grouped. Insufficiency, Extremes, Disguises, Standards, are titles which have no particular reason for existence, except on the plea that, divisions of some kind being necessary, there might be worse ones. The names are a little Emersonian, and somewhat incongruous when used by Mr. Russell. But the anecdotes, quotations, and saws are excellently chosen, and hold the attention with that fascination which every one has experienced with good books of this kind; one reads on and on, long after the point of mental satiety is reached. This forms a charm, and at the same time a defect. Too many anecdotes and whatnots crowding into the memory only elbow each other out, and unless the reader has strength of will to stop when he is full, he has nothing left but the questionable pleasure of having killed time. The present volume will be found most agreeable reading for odd moments. It may prove a perfect mine to the professional teller of anecdotes.

Seelye's "Christian Missions."

THE Rev. Dr. Julius H. Seelye, Professor in Amherst College, is widely and favorably known for his eloquence as a preacher, and for his special interest in foreign missionary effort. He has even been, to a certain extent, himself engaged in foreign missionary work, having been invited to give a series of lectures to English-speaking natives of India, a few years since, and having accepted the invitation with some not unsuccessful results. The

present volume argues the need of modern missionary work and the hopefulness of it. Those who agree fully with Dr. Seelye's conclusions, as most earnest Christian men will, doubtless, agree with

*Library Notes. By A. P. Russell. New York: Hurd & Houghton.

them, will differ pretty widely in their estimate of the value of his argument. There is in it nothing especially new or striking;-and that, too, at a time when, certainly the argument for Christian missions needs to be restated and rested on a basis where it can stand against the objections and misgivings of practical men, whose sympathies and efforts are liable to be absorbed in charities that begin (and end) at home. With such an opportunity to get a hearing as Professor Seelye had, it seems a pity that he could not have used it to a greater advantage. Still, his book is very readable and more than readable, and will be welcome among those who do not need a more thorough and profound treatment of the subject. The work of foreign missions is very far from being obsolete; and there are signs that just now it is about to receive a new impulse. Messrs. Dodd & Mead are the publishers of Prof. Seelye's little volume.

French and German Books.

Drei Einzige Töchter. Novellen, von Berthold Auerbach. A German novelist shows to great advantage in a short story because the limits imposed upon his tendency to discursiveness work in a salutary manner on the general plan of the book. Though these three small novels about "only daughters "' do not often touch bottom in the way of studies in human nature, they yet are fresh and pleasant, and, for a German, decidedly liberal. The first strives to give a local coloring by some slight mention of the new German Parliament; the second, by laying the scene in a garrison town where a political prisoner enacts, after a sufficiently tame manner, the antique episode made famous throughout Germany by Schiller's ballad of "Die Burgschaft;" the third has a good patriotic motive in showing the folly of-one can hardly call it ridiculing-the States Rights feeling, formerly so rampant in the several parts of Germany. There are many good passages which show a writer with a fine sympathy for landscape; thus the emotion one feels in ascending a Swiss hill is quite poetically given. As to the finer affections, they are hardly of the loftiest flight. The matterof-fact way parents and children, not to say friends and acquaintances, have of canvassing the propriety of marriages between various young couples to said young couples' stolid faces, is truly amusing.

It is

something of the same spirit of unquestioning matter-of-fact that mars the English novels of Miss Austen.

Les Deux Frères, par George Sand. Christern. New York. The novels of George Sand can be readily divided into naughty and good, and of the two camps this book belongs to the former. At least, the combats of disinterestedness which result from a faux pas of a married woman, whose husband refuses to acknowledge his eldest son, are hardly topics for the ingenuous. The French, possibly from being oftener in scrapes, know better than other people how to get out of them, or, at least, to live in them with some show of heroism. Other people succumb ignobly and inartistically.

There are some very good strokes in the drawing of feminine character in this novel, but that is about all that can be said for it.

These

L'eau dormante; extraits des mémoires du docteur Bernagius. Lucien Biart. Christern. Four short tales and a small tragedy by Lucien Biart hardly need an introductory quotation from a Mexican monthly magazine, "El Artista," to attest the truth of the landscape and character-drawing. stories of Mexico are not only thoroughly admirable in art, but their qualities are such that no one would hesitate in accepting them as sketches from the hand of an eye-witness. Their quiet wit shows the man of cultivation, while their picturesqueness and something in the objects themselves remind one of Bret Harte. Like the latter, M. Biart has to do with a wild and lawless element, but one only lawless on occasion, and therefore stronger in contrast with its surface look of civilization, instead of Mr. Harte's almost permanent semi-barbarism. Moreover, the characters move in scenes much fuller of color.

as

Ce que femme peut is excellent in the way of quiet handling of a tragic subject, and the employment of the great bird-eating spider of Central America, a running and somewhat humorous parallel to the human tragedy going on, is most novel and delightful. The Doctor Bernagius tells his story as if had been reluctantly torn from the more interesting doings of the spider to take a part in the wild acts of his Mexican patients. The following tale, Silvéria, succeeds in leaving the impression of a bewildering young beauty who dupes everybody, and makes the whole sage circle of the Doctor's intimates insist on her marrying the very man she has really been in love with. As a "surprise story" of the modern kind, this is a very pleasing specimen. The next, L'eau dormante, draws its name from the lake near the hacienda of the heroine, who, one cannot help noticing, conceals a storm of passion and force in her placid bosom, just as the lake, for all its immovability, lies ready to boil up and ingulf the superstitious Indians who seek to propitiate it by charms. The advent of a New York prima donna, and the admiration for her which the Mexican husband, Don Luis, cannot conceal, sets in dangerous motion this vigorous nature hid under apparent sloth. The catastrophe comes, with final and utter rout of the American songstress, who appears to be a very nice sort of person, the wounding of the prima donna's favored admirer, and the bringing back of Don Luis to his wife in a fury of jealous love. These be strong meats, but good.

Deutches Akademisches Jahrbuch. A Leipsic house has issued a well-bound octavo giving a full and detailed list of all academies of science, universities, technological and high schools throughout Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the German provinces of Russia. The work is one which has been much needed, both at home and abroad, considering the number of foreigners who yearly resort to Germany for instruction. A good portrait of Albert, King of Saxony, "Rector Magnificentis