it is often easier to praise a book than to read it, to analyze the charm of these essays with their multum in parvo is more difficult.

J. B. E.

THE TAKING OF HELEN. By John Masefield. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1923 and 1924. Pp. 169.

In this miscellany of pieces, Mr. Masefield tells the story of the escape of Helen from Menelaus of Sparta and of her sailing with Paris, and Nireus, the friend of Paris. It is a long and lovely prose poem in a simple, romantic idiom relieved by colloquial passages and emotionally heightened by occasional verses of searching beauty. The story as a story is told with grip and tension.

Then follow several selections from letters, including a graphic description of Niagara, the account of an excursion in an aeroplane, and other matters.

After that, there is an instruction in play-writing, so just, so wise and so useful that one rather regrets the introduction into it of an out-of-tone example whimsically conceived and jocularly written. No doubt it was set down at first independently rather than illustratively and is used here as an afterthought.

The little book concludes with an appreciation of the art of foxhunting, and with remarks on the atmosphere of Reynard the Fox.

THE LADY OF BELMONT. By St. John G. Ervine. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1924. Pp. 95.

Mr. Ervine's extension of The Merchant of Venice, if a trifle cynical, is vastly clever and amusing. The time is ten years after Antonio's trial and Shylock's discomfiture, and the place is Portia's house in Belmont. The friendly visit of Old Doctor Bellario and the fortuitous coming of Shylock, succored because of illness, bring about swiftly changing situations that occupy four succeeding acts of complicated schemes and intentions. Portia, Shylock, Bassanio, and Jessica are the chief characters, but time has given Shylock and Portia the reciprocal understanding that comes from long experience of human nature. It is true that none of these characters is Shakespearean otherwise than in name. They are modern people working back to meet

Shakespeare and do not meet him or his spirit, despite their trappings and their author's postulates; but Mr. Ervine manages to make out of their fears and follies a capital ironic melodrama.

THE WAY THINGS HAPPEN. By Clemence Dane. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1924. Pp. 93.

This is a play-Miss Dane calls it "A Story in Three Acts"about six persons, rising, in levels of dramatic interest, to four, and then to two,-Martin Farren and Shirley Pryde. Martin is a strong character spoiled by egoism and betrayed by the fear and weakness of a moment into embezzlement; Shirley is an orphaned Cinderella whose soul is too worthy and too honest to permit anæmic self-effacement, yet who unselfishly pays a great price to save Martin, a price which redeems him even in his very rejection of it. The play is well balanced in its movement and moments, with a skilful thematic reference, and a rather striking psychological solution (in the conversations between the dying Mrs. Farren and Shirley at the end of the third act, and between Shirley and Martin in the fourth) touching masculine power-love as against feminine sympathy-love.

THE FRIENDLY CLUB AND OTHER PORTRAITS. By Francis Parsons. Hartford: Edwin Valentine Mitchell. 1922. Pp. 223.

This is a friendly book about some post-revolutionary New Englanders, both men and women, whose characters, writings, or public activities have made their memories interesting. Mr. Parsons succeeds, because of his marked sympathy, in evoking out of dust and distance much of the human essence of such figures as Trumbull, Lemuel Hopkins, Colonel David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Noah Webster, and other members or friends of the Hartford Wits ("The Friendly Club"), and of Mrs. Lydia Huntley Sigourney, John G. C. Brainard, Samuel G. Goodrich ("Peter Parley"), The Rev. Joel Hawes, Gideon Welles, Henry Howard Brownell, and others. We are introduced (the degree of our interest in her may determine the degree of our worthiness to know her) to the ill-fated Elizabeth Whitman, whose strange tragedy may not have seemed wholly a tragedy to her, and who

must have been a friend of friends to those who understood the dear reticence and the delicate insight that belonged to her charm. The closing five familiar rememberings of persons, places and occasions, have that gracious, home-like flavor that induces lingering. Especially is this true of "The Fabric of a Dream" and "The Quiet Life". Mr. Parsons, we are sure, knows well not only his New England history, but also his Lamb, his Hazlitt, and his Jane Austen. G. H. C.

THE ENCHANTed Mesa and OTHER POEMS. By Glenn Ward Dresbach. New York: Henry Holt & Company. 1924.

This mesa is a vast block, stone and sand,

Left by a child-god in a greater play

Of blocks than we are given to understand.

From these bare walls the dazed sands stretch away

To meet blue ridges trailing through the haze

Memorial splendors of chaotic days.

This is the opening stanza of The Enchanted Mesa. Dresbach is free from non-poetic entanglements. He is identified with no movement, literary or other. He writes no prefaces, is committed to no theory, belongs to no literary or intellectual clique, is possessed by no 'purpose', makes no pretences, is rooted to no single soil, is given to no specialty. He does not classify in the jargon of criticism. He is simply a poet. The stuff of his poetry is the varied scene of life impressed on a sensitive eye and soul as he has gone about the winning of the livelihood that has made possible the practice of his real vocation, which is always poetry. Whether in Panama, in New Mexico and the desert, or at home in the Middle West town, he makes the same simple and direct transfer of the life about him to the page. Not only is his material the spontaneous appropriation of a responsive soul, but its expression also is highly spontaneous. This is Dresbach's fifth volume, and it shows the same natural and easy grace of language, rhythm, and rhyme with which he began, the same delicate fancy which envelops in loveliness the most homely experiences and scenes, and the same loftier flights which shed on less ordinary things the glory of "immemorial splendors”. GRANT SHOWERMAN.

The University of Wisconsin.

BOOK NOTICES

MOSAICS. By Beatrice E. Harmon. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1923. Pp. 63.

BURNT MEADOWS. By M. L. Carrel. Paris: Jouve et Compagnie. 1923Pp. 120.

GEOGRAPHY AND PLAYS. By Gertrude Stein. Boston: The Four Seas Company. 1922. Pp. 419.

SCARLET RUNNER. By Elizabeth Shaw Montgomery. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. 1923. Pp. 96.

Mosaics is one of the series published by the Yale University Press in order to encourage younger and newer poets in America. Although Miss Harmon's work shows at times a good deal of emotional overstrain, it deserves the encouragement accorded it. Her writing is modest, sincere and delicately phrased. We are especially pleased with the rondeau on the bluebird, Red Slippers, When I Go Back to Reading-Town and Night-Song.

The form-influence of Tennyson and of Emerson, with something of the theme-influence of Browning is apparent in undistinguished and too fevered Burnt Meadows, the work of a writer whose frequent cynicism seems to be a mask for his sense of disillusionment.

The title of Miss Gertrude Stein's present book refers to her impressions of England, France, Italy and of her fellow-Americans (she was born in Pennsylvania, but has lived much abroad), and also to a number of enigmatical, formless little plays. Despite the excuses made for her style and programme by Sherwood Anderson, it is impossible to call such work literature. Mr. Anderson pleads for the right to extend the province of one's art, by which he doubtless means-all life being already subject to artistic interpretation-the meanings and methods of one's craftsmanship. We may concede artists the right to make their technique, their artifice, as elastic as possible, but to do this at the expense of the values already gained through long experience in normal technique and artifice is to retrograde into sheer chattering welter, as Miss Stein has done.

Scarlet Runner is a first book of verse, and, it must be said frankly, a rather negligible one. Its tone is self-conscious, its note often forced, and its workmanship amateur.

OLD ENGLISH POETRY. By J. Duncan Spaeth, Professor of English in Princeton University. Princeton University Press. 1922. Pp. xii, 268. Professor Spaeth has here translated into alliterative verse "the best and most representative portions of the considerable body of extant poetry produced in England between the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasion and the Norman conquest." The translations of the narrative poetry are graphic and vigorous, and an unusual degree of sympathy is mingled with sound scholarship in the treatment of lyric, riddling and gnomic verse. The rendering of Beowulf, especially, is so good that we regret the omissions. The notes are full and dependable.

ENGLISH POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Edited by G. R. Elliott, Professor of English Literature in Bowdoin College, and Norman Foerster, Professor of English in the University of North Carolina. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1923. Pp. xxiii, 825.

An admirable anthology for both the college student and the general reader. The text is clear and readable, the notes are scholarly without being heavy, and the arrangement is sound. We think that Mrs. Browning, Miss Rossetti, and certain contemporary poets are inadequately represented, and that it would have been well to include Isabella among the poems chosen from Keats; but in general the editors have realized their desire to trace effectively by balanced selection the movement and meaning of nineteenth-century English poetry as a whole.

LIBRARY OF SOUTHERN LITERATURE. Volume XVII. Edwin Anderson Alderman and Charles Alphonso Smith, Editors-in-Chief; John Calvin Metcalf, Literary Editor. Atlanta: Martin & Hoyt Company. 1923. Pp. xvii, 462.

In this first supplementary volume the editors make an effort to extend the range of The Library of Southern Literature through the past two decades down to the present. The selections of authors, poems and passages have been carefully made and the biographical sketches are written with knowledge, sometimes also with skill; but we regret the elasticity which permitted the inclusion of some rather parochial writers and writings, and we think that two or three contemporary Southern authors could