men who control employment in the anthracite regions, those in whom, according to Mr. Baer, God in his wisdom vested control of the property rights of the land, have seen fit to establish relations of continued suspicion with their workmen, it is only to be expected that each side will watch the other narrowly, and judge each move as a hostile critic. Mr. Mitchell may seem to be unduly apprehensive of trouble. Mr. Baer seems to be singularly ready to furnish it. The people of the United States, and particularly of the East, where hard, or anthracite, coal is almost exclusively used, have good reason to apprehend the clash of these two masterful forces. While they fight we shall suffer, as we did in the last contest.

THE PRESIDENT'S SUBMARINE TRIP.

THE

HE proclivity of President Roosevelt to do daring and unexpected things is so well known that the emotions of alarm with which the country learned that he had taken a dive in a submarine boat were "unmingled," as the New York Times remarks, "with any appreciable admixture of surprise." As the New York Telegraph shows, every theatrical accessory seems present to tempt him. On the afternoon of August 25, when he made his famous trip in the Plunger, a stinging northwest gale blew over the sound near Oyster Bay and lashed its surface into a fury. The whole world had been informed of the probability of his venture. The newspapers fairly egged him on by magnifying the dangers he would undergo, and by wondering whether he would" take a dare " in spite of them. So, down he went to the bottom of the sea, and remained there for fifty minutes, besides subjecting himself during two hours more to other risks as the craft darted like a porpoise through the waters.

The papers which justify the President in subjecting his valuable life to whatever risk there may have been attached to his venturesome trip in the Plunger, claim that his experiment has demonstrated the efficiency of submarine vessels in certain circumstances, and so has done much to relieve the distrust which the public entertained for this sort of craft. Thus the Philadelphia Inquirer declares:

"It is certain that the advertisement given by the President's tour beneath the waves has given them a notoriety that could not otherwise be achieved. It has been shown that they can be operated at will, can discharge torpedoes, and the general inference is that they will become active as engines of war in future."

On the other hand, papers which condemn this latest manifestation of the President's daring spirit, fail to see any excuse for what they are pleased to call his "foolhardiness." They refer to the mishap to the American boat, the Porpoise, which just a year ago

sank to the depth of 120 feet, and narrowly escaped remaining there with all her crew, and the more recent accidents which befel the British 48 and the French Farfadet, as showing that the President did actually undergo a danger such as the head of no nation should run except in the strict line of his official duty. Only two incidents can be found in the history

of this country that
in any way suggest
the risk and peril
of Mr. Roosevelt's
plunge to the bottom
of the sea. In 1844
President Tyler wit-
nessed with a party
of high officials the
first shot of a large
newly invented gun.
It burst and the ex-
plosion killed several
persons in the party;
and Mr. Tyler him-
self narrowly escaped
death. At the be-
ginning of the Civil
War, President Lin-
coln stood on the
ramparts of Fort
Stevens near Wash-
ington and watched
the battle of Brightwood. The exposure in both these cases was
conspicuous and deliberate. In the first instance it was not con-
sidered particularly hazardous, and in the second Mr. Lincoln was
justified on the ground that his presence gave encouragement to
the Union troops. But in comparing Lincoln's act with the recent
one of Mr. Roosevelt the Washington Star notes a wide difference
and says:

From stereograph, copyright, 1905, by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT ABOUT TO SAIL IN THE
LAUNCH OF THE "SYLPH "" TO THE
PLUNGER."

"It can hardly be argued that Mr. Roosevelt's trip beneath the waves was in the line of his duty even to the degree in which Mr. Lincoln was within the requirements of his position at Fort Stevens. He could not gain a better conception of the utility of the submarine boat by making a trip on one under the surface. His official knowledge was not materially enlarged by his personal participation in the dangers."

In fact, the exploit was so characteristic of the man that many people would have been disappointed if he had not taken the plunge. No daredevil prank seems to be thought to be beyond the President, if it can be excused on the ground of possibly serving some useful purpose. The New York World in a humorous article on the event thus sums up his spirit and peculiarities:

"President Roosevelt should have an individual Hall of Fame. The President is twenty men rolled into one; there are more sides to his character than there are facets on a diamond. A composite photograph of Theodore Roosevelt would look like the grandson of Nimrod and a

IN

STUDYING THE SUN'S ECLIPSE.

N days of ignorance and superstition a total eclipse of the sun was a terrifying omen. To the unscientific even in civilized nations, it is a weird and gruesome sight; but to astronomers and the intelligent generally it is "a thing of beauty and a joy forever." The shadow of the moon 167 miles wide at its greatest width, which on August 30 sped at the rate of nearly 2,500 miles an hour, and cast its pall, as the New York Evening Telegram describes it, "like a gigantic funeral ribbon reaching from the wilds of Hudson Bay, across the Atlantic and ending in Southeast Arabia," appalled and interested all these different classes of people.

PARTIAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN.

As seen by a member of the Baltimore American's art department. The photograph was made by a telescopic camera..

The distance of about 7,400 miles, which this monstrous and deep black shadow traversed, was covered in a little less than three hours. Consequently the duration of total darkness at every point was short-ranging from two and one-half minutes in Canada to three and three-fourths minutes in Spain. But astronomers had calculated the coming and going of the eclipse to a nicety, and had made such elaborate and exact preparation for its reception that every lesson it could teach has undoubtedly been learned; and so the New York Herald ventures to remark:

"Probably a year hence, when the [photographic] plates have been developed and studied and measured, the astronomers will begin writing about the great eclipse of 1905, and their story will be couched in technical phrases hardly more intelligible than Cingalese to the general public."

Five American parties-three from the Naval Observatory at Washington and two from the Lick Observatory in California

THE ECLIPSE IN ITS TOTALITY.

1. The corona-what is it?

2. The sun's atmosphere-what are the conditions of the gases which compose it, and how high do they extend above the surface of the sun?

These are the principal questions, and the most interesting and perplexing of them is the first-What is the corona? Some believe that it is a giant shower of meteors. Others maintain that it is similar to Saturn's rings, but on a vaster scale. These, however, are only conjectures. According to Prof. C. R. Downing's article in the New York Herald our positive knowledge on the subject extends only to this:

Dissatisfaction over the "Bennington" Findings. Among the exchanges that came to us last week we noticed a few journals that were inclined to criticize the findings of the Court of Inquiry into the Bennington disaster. They declared that Ensign Wade and his dead assistants were not the only ones to blame, and scored the Navy Department for placing such a young man as Ensign Wade in charge of the engine-room. The Minneapolis Tribune called Mr. Wade the "scapegoat of the Bennington"; and The Army and Navy Register (Washington) criticized the department's policy of restricting engineering appointments in the navy to graduates at Annapolis.

A

S

Eclipse

From the Washington despatches it appeared that Secretary of the Navy Bonaparte was also dissatisfied with the findings. In the Secretary's review of the case he went beyond the court and ordered Commander Lucien Young, of the Bennington, before a court-martial on a charge of neglect of duty. This action brought out a chorus of approval from the press. Mr. Bonaparte "showed that he, and not the system that caused the disaster, is to rule the Navy Department," declares the New York Press. The reversal of the court's findings, it adds, " is significant not of any attempt to shield an officer from blame that ought to attach to him, but of the purpose of the Secretary to fix the responsibility where it belongs." Mr. Bonaparte disagrees with the court's finding that the ship was "in an excellent state of discipline," and declares that the enlisted force of the engineering division were lax and inattentive in the discharge of their duties.

end

Arabia

But it was as editor, rather than as author, The Evening Post asserts, that Mrs. Dodge rendered her best service:

LETTERS AND ART:

A GRACIOUS INFLUENCE IN JUVENILE

LITERATURE.

S the author of books which have achieved wide popularity among the children of more than one country, and as the editor, since its inception in 1873, of St. Nicholas, Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, who died on the 21st of August at Onteora Park, has been for more than thirty years a potent and gracious influence in juvenile literature. The extent of that influence," remarks the Chicago Record-Herald, "it is, of course, impossible to measure, but it was exercised with a gentle effectiveness upon successive thousands of little ones in the most impressionable period of life." Altho seventy-. four years of age, Mrs. Dodge had her hand on the editorial tiller until within two weeks of her death; and only a year ago she published a volume of "Poems and Verses." It was in her magazine that the children of a generation ago first read and loved the delectable fairy stories of Frank R. Stockton; and it was there, too, that Palmer Cox's Brownies entered into their heritage. Mrs. Dodge's most widely known book, “Hans Brinker; or The Silver Skates," described by The Evening Post (New York) as one of the most popular juvenile stories ever written," has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Russian, and Italian, and was awarded the Montheyon prize of the French Academy. In the volume, "Women Authors of Our Day in Their Homes," we read that" when Mrs. Dodge's son, some years ago, asked in Amsterdam for the best and most popular Dutch story for boys and girls, the bookseller handed him to his delighted surprise-a Dutch translation of Hans Brinker,' with the remark that the best book of the kind was by an American woman." Mrs. Dodge, remarks the Boston Transcript," was our feminine Hans Christian Andersen "-referring, probably, more to the place she held in children's hearts than to the characteristic qualities of her stories.

The St. Nicholas was founded in 1873, and soon absorbed Our Young Folks, for which John T. Trowbridge was then the star writer. In that golden era the St. Nicholas published several of Trowbridge's best tales,' The Young Surveyor' and others of the 'Jack Hazard' series; Noah Brooks's 'Boy Emigrants,' Miss Alcott's Eight Cousins,' and some of the wittiest and most whimsical of Frank R. Stockton's short sketches. Surely that is a noble muster roll. Graybeards of forty will testify to the eagerness with which they awaited the mail that brought the St. Nicholas, to the gusto with which they plunged into the fresh instalment of Trowbridge or Miss Alcott, to the earnestness with which they begged to sit up a little later that night, and to the bright, troubled dreams in which they lived over the fascinating adventures. But in a day or two the magazine had been read from cover to cover, including the alluring advertisements of bargains in foreign stamps and jig-saws; and twenty-eight long days stretched away before the next issue. The boy or girl who never saw the St. Nich olas in the seventies and eighties was robbed of one of the legitimate joys of childhood: The vitality of those first numbers is proved by their hold upon a new generation. To-day our young people find in the old bound volumes quite as much delight as in the copies that fall fresh from the press-perhaps more." el cot to More than once, in the editorial comment on Mrs. Dodge's death, is to be detected a note of wistfulness, of reminiscence mingled with regret for childhood's vanished point of view which made the coming of St. Nicholas an event. One writer surmises that "our children may, in their poor way, get as much out of life and literature as we did," but adds that "they will never know what they missed by being born twenty-five years late."

Her death leads The Evening Post to comment on our changed ideas as to the kind of literature suitable for youthful readers. It harks back to the time of Scott's boyhood, when young people were brought up on Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett. Of the period more immediately prior to the publication of "Hans Brinker," and of the influence of the latter book, we read further;

We had been suffering from an excess of didactic literature for children-perhaps a reaction from the freedom, not to say naugh tiness, of the eighteenth century. Sandford and Merton,' by Thomas Day, had led the way for hundreds of sermons and lessons of worldly wisdom in a thin disguise of narrative. In this country the' Rollo' books by Abbott had carried the type to its logical development. For writing of this kind the Sunday-school libraries, then swiftly growing in every town and hamlet, formed a wide market. In the latter fifties William Taylor Adams (Oliver Optic) had broken the mold by constructing stories of rapid movement, crammed with adventure. But his plots were mechanical and his heroes were preposterous youths of superhuman intelligence and heroism. In the same period Trowbridge was offering a far less distorted vision of the world. Mrs. Dodge shared with. him the honor of showing that' juvenile fiction' could contain plenty of action while the characters remained sane and convincing. Among contemporaries she stands closest to Louisa May Alcott. We do not forget that amusing skit, 'Miss Maloney on the Chinese Question,' when we say Mrs. Dodge lacks, perhaps, something of Miss Alcott's buoyancy and unflagging humor, and something also of Miss Alcott's sentimentality."

NATURE AND MAN IN HARDY'S NOVELS.

O compare so dramatic a novelist as Thomas Hardy with so undramatic a poet as Wordsworth, admits Mr. H. W. Nevinson, may seem strange; but such a comparison, he urges, is nevertheless inevitable. The resemblance which Mr. Nevinson emphasizes (in his volume of essays, "Books and Personalities") has little to do with the obvious love of both for the face of external nature and their intimate knowledge of all her aspects, but is found rather in their view of man in his relation to nature. They both, moreover, seek among men of low estate that "aristocracy of passion" which has been described as the true patent of nobility. Says the writer: "Both love the mankind, that lies close to the breast of earth, and is as truly sprung from her as the grass and trees." Furthermore, "in speaking of mankind they never lose sight of this ancient world, so full of strange history, so full of unconscious influences and associations which for generations have nurtured the children of men and form the setting of their lives." How this relationship of man to nature is brought out by Thomas Hardy the author indicates as follows:

In all Thomas Hardy's work there is something of the grave simplicity of places, like his Wessex, where man has lived long in close relationship to earth and the seasons. Most of his characters have grown to be what they are by slow and gradual changes, like the woods or the surface of the downs. They are deep-rooted in far-off traditions of the generations which have passed and left them there. At first sight they may appear rather emotionless or at least stoical, as well as solid. Their interests and difficulties lie in the normal lot of mankind, as it was in the beginning and is now. They have the half-unconscious humor and deliberate speech of men who have time to observe the hours, and to whom the world

...

has not been narrowed by journeys and removals through hurriedly shifted scenes. Amid all their drama of events we hear singularly little exclamation of joy or sorrow, and hardly any wailing or excessive grief. Little fuss is made over birth and death and the fortunes that may come between. The earth turns upon her ancient round, man appears upon her surface to run his course, and the eyes of the trilobite that died millions of years ago, stare from the rock into the eyes of the dying. It is by the very quietude of their surroundings that Hardy secures success when the spirits of his creation strike up all of a sudden. For into this quiet atmosphere of ancient life he loves to introduce a soul touched from its birth by something alien, something that reaches out into a world of different experience, whether for delight or spiritual need. Deep in such souls lies some trace of precious but perilous substance, like the thin vein of gold which is not used for its own sake, and spoils the building stone for use. In all the four great tragedies we find it so-in' Far from the Madding Crowd,' The Return of the Native,''Tess,' and ' Jude'; and so it is in' A Pair of Blue Eyes,' The Mayor of Casterbridge,' and 'The Hand of Ethelberta,' which come but little below those other four."

Commenting upon Lionel Johnson's remark that the one characteristic scene in Hardy "is the great down by night, with its dead in their ancient graves and its lonely living figure," he adds by way of amplification: "No writer has so penetrating a sense of place; the earth and sky which surround his men and women claim them as bone of their bone; but nevertheless, it is in that lonely living figure that the interest centers. Lonely, not merely in the face of nature, it moves, but lonely among its fellow men, impetuously seeking its true kin and its true star, time after time mistaken and beguiled, and seldom finding what it seeks, or finding it too early or too late." He continues:

With a strength of construction that has rightly been called architectural, Hardy shows us the development of a soul like this. Character is fate, and link by link from its small beginning we see the fateful chain of character wrought out. The end is often sorrow, and the finer the workmanship, the deeper the gravity, and latterly the gloom. The tendency to the tragic side is nearly always felt, and it is noticeable how often the shadow of the gallows falls across the fields, like a cruel makeshift for some eternal justice. But part of Hardy's honor is that he disdains to put us off with any fool's paradise of easy solutions to life's problems. No Englishman since Wordsworth has heard the still, sad music of humanity with so fine an ear, and none has regarded the men and women of our country with a compassion so profound and yet so stern as they pass with tears and laughter between the graves and the stars."

J

THE VAGABOND AS A LITERARY TYPE.

UST published in Paris is a volume of short stories by Maxim Gorky. The translator, Mr. Semenoff, writes a study of Gorky which occupies a third of the book and affords an analysis of the Russian vagabond in his influence on literature. Mr. Semenoff emphasizes a correspondence between the vagabond days of Gorky and of other Russian authors. Gorky, he asserts, was not the first to create the vagabond in Russian literature; but he was the first to make of this figure "a positive type, creative, almost apostolic."

Gorky was "revealed" to the French public in his masterly preface to "The Vagabonds," and since that time in France, as in some degree elsewhere, he passes as the exclusive exponent of the vagabond life, which he is supposed, if not to have invented, at least to have introduced into Russian literature. Controverting this view, Mr. Semenoff explains:

"The vagabond was and is still an essentially Russian type, peculiar to the not yet completely organized life of Russia-created, so to speak, by the conditions of his sorrowful march in the path of progress. Call him, if you will, the superfluous man' of the forties (as depicted by Turgenef and others); view him as the representative of the Slavic soul' (of Voguë); present him as the 'ex-man,' etc., yet you have always the Russian vagabond.

...

Further dwelling on the Russian conditions which create this

vagabond type, which we of the Occident know only as a survivai, rapidly disappearing, of tramps or bohemians, the author asserts that it is common to all Russian literature, tho to Maxim Gorky has it fallen to exhibit it "before lettered humanity with great brilliancy."

It is easy to understand, he continues, why the opposite type is lacking in Russian literature. Republican liberty only makes possible a contrary type, the type positif, says Mr. Semenoff; it makes possible that inspired hymn of our unforgettable Zola, “Labor," as well as giving birth to Enjolras in "Les Misérables" of Victor Hugo. Therefore, he reasons, we find in the treasures of Russian literature a gallery of "the best men, the best natures in the world, but vague theorizers, incapable of action, Russian Hamlets, 'superfluous men '-—such as (to specify only a few)— Bezoukoff, Tolstoy, Iskander, Turgenef. But the types of fighters, men of action, who are the advance guard of their generation, who lead life, are hardly indicated. We find this rare type, Mr. Semenoff admits, in Rakhmetoff, a character from Tchernychevsky, or in some novel by Omulevsky. But he reminds us that these above-mentioned examples are forbidden in Russia! And if these positive types are presented at all clearly, he continues, they are pictured as foreigners or as caricatures.

Supporting this theory, he goes on to present Maxim Gorky as making the first perfectly successful attempt to show in Russian literature a positive type, a man who knows what he wants and where he is going. This man is Nil, from the novel whose subtitle is "Scenes from the Bezsemenoff Family." Nil, in company with the vagabond Tetereff, is the man long awaited. We read :

Already, before he appears, from the first scene of the first act, Pauline, his betrothed, presents him in an interview with Tatiana Bezsemenoff: 'A man ought to know what he wants in this life,' says Pauline. 'And does Nil know?' Tatiana demands. With certainty Pauline answers: 'I can hardly explain as well as he can, but it is the bad people, wicked and greedy! He does not like them!' Tatiana, a little Hamlet in petticoats, is doubtful: Who is good? Who is bad?' 'Nil knows,' Pauline concludes, with conviction.

Mr. Semenoff goes on to tell of the overwhelming success of Gorky's play, "The Night Refuge," produced at the famous little Art Theater in Moscow. In this play he brought together a fair assortment of the vagabonds, failures, destitutes, scattered through his published pages and his wandering life. It was, condensed, the essence of his wanderjahre.

A writer in "Russian Speech," quoted by Mr. Semenoff, indicates the motif of the play. Each of these vagabonds has at last found a refuge, and there his fate logically overtakes him. We read:

“The ex-baron, for a glass of brandy, goes down on four feet and barks like a dog. The ex-telegraphist continues to trick the others. The girl is still wanton. The thief steals. And these all profit by each other. The baron drinks with the money of the girl. The actor drinks with the money of the thief. The thief is honored among the others. There is no one in the world better than the thief. Money comes easily to him.

"And into this refuge of putrefaction comes a ray of love and of generosity. A sermon on the sacred rights of man is heard. This utterance is that of an old tramp, Luke, who comes to the refuge. God knows whence he comes or whither he will go. He has seen much, lived much, suffered much; he speaks of Siberia; his soul has passed through a serious purgatory before becoming so crystal pure as we see it in the play. He brings with him a freshness of thought, the illumination of a divine principle; . his princi

ple of good is already realized, formed, palpable. all men equally.

"What follows? Nothing real. The wheel of life turns regularly, and in this hole of a cellar all goes on as usual. But no matter: in the darkness there was a moment when the sun shone with brilliancy. And a marvelous spectacle is presented to our gaze. Under the filth, the abjection, the horror, in this refuge, in spite of all the failures of the human derelicts, man is living!"

The solidarity of man, good and bad, the glorification of strength and of beauty, the necessity of harmonious thought embracing all manifestations of life, the effort toward the suppression of certain narrow formulas of life for the benefit of forms more just and comprehensive-this, says Mr. Semenoff, is the final fruitage of the vagabond root in Russian literature.

It is thus, he concludes, that we learn to understand the cry, " Vive l'homme!" of Maxim Gorky.-Translation made for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Born in 1867, Ernest Dowson died in 1900. In the introduction to the volume of Dowson's collected poems Mr. Symons thus analyzes his personality:

"To Dowson, as to all those who have not been content to ask unlikely gifts in vain,' nature, life, destiny, whatever one chooses to call it, that power which is strength to the strong, presented itself as a barrier against which all one's strength only served to

un

in the school of English Decadents that flourished during the last years of the nineteenth century. Of this school was Ernest Christopher Dowson, whose collected poems, with an illuminating memoir and appreciation by Arthur Symons, have been recently published in England and America. Mr. Symons's record of Dowson's brief life-he was thirty-three when he died-sets before us the picture of a physically frail young man who elected to walk in the mire, but who walked nevertheless with a certain poignant aloofness of spirit. A soul' unspotted from the world,' in a body which one sees visibly soiling under one's eyes; that improbability," writes Mr. Symons," is what all who knew him saw in Dowson, as his youthful physical grace gave way year by year, and the personal charm underlying it remained changed." His death, continues the same critic, will mean very little to the world at large, "but it will mean a great deal to the few people who care passionately for poetry." His literary output was slight in quantity, consisting of three tiny volumes of verse"Verses," published in 1896, " The Pierrot of a Minute " (1897), and "Decorations," published after his deain in 1900-and "Dilemmas," a volume of prose which he described as "stories and studies in sentiment." Yet in his few "evasive, imma rial snatches of song," Mr. Symons finds, "implied for the most part, hidden away like a secret, all the fever and turmoil and the unattained dreams of a life which had itself so much of the swift, disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius." A half dozen of Dowson's poems, says The Daily Graphic (London) " take their place among the most exquisite poems of their generation." As "perfect expressions of an imperfect but prevailing mood," it adds, "they will live beyond the Victorian age from which they have arisen in a last sigh." The Scotsman laments him as "a genuine poet," tho 'not in the English tradition." His poem to "Cynara" is characterized by Mr. Symons as one of the greatest lyrical poems of our time." The last two stanzas are as follows:

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion,

dash one to more hopeless ruin. He was not a dreamer; destiny passes by the dreamer, sparing him because he clamors for nothing. He was a child, clamoring for so many things, all impossible. With a body too weak for ordinary existence, he desired all the enchantments of all the senses. With a soul too shy to tell its own secret, except in exquisite evasions, he desired the boundless confidence of love.

Dowson had exquisite sensibility,

he vibrated in harmony with every delicate emotion; but he had no outlook, he had not the escape of intellect. His only escape, then, was to plunge into the crowd,. to fancy that he lost sight of himself as. he disappeared from the sight of others. The more he soiled himself at that grosscontact, the further would he seem to be from what beckoned to him in one vain illusion after another vain illusion, in the delicate places of the world."

His literary affinities were Swinburne and Paul Verlaine; but more particularly the latter; for, says Mr. Reid, “nothing could very well be further from Mr. Swinburne's vehemence, redundancy, and lack of restraint, than the exquisite, halfshy, just a little self-conscious art of Ernest Dowson." His poetic quality is analyzed more minutely by Mr. Symons:

"He was quite Latin in his feeling for youth, and death, and the old age of roses,' and the pathos of our little hour in which to live and love; Latin in his elegance, reticence, and simple grace in the treatment of these motives; Latin, finally, in his sense of their sufficiency for the whole of one's mental attitude. He used the commonplaces of poetry frankly, making them his own by his belief in them the Horatian Cynara or Neobule was still the natural symbol for him when he wished to be most personal. I remember his saying to me that his ideal of a line of verse was the line of Poe:

"The viol, the violet, and the vine;"

and the gracious, not remote or unreal beauty, which clings about such words and such images as these, was always to him the true poetical beauty. There never was a poet to whom verse came more naturally, for the song's sake; his theories were all esthetic, almost technical ones, such as a theory, indicated by his preference for the line of Poe, that the letter 'v' was the most beautiful of the letters, and could never be brought into verse too often. For any more abstract theories he had neither tolerance nor needs Poetry as a philosophy did not exist for him; it existed solely as the loveliest of the arts. He loved the elegance of Horace, all that was most complex in the simplicity of Poe, most bird-like in the human melodies of Verlaine. He had the pure lyric gift, unweighted or unballasted by any other quality of mind or emotion; and a song, for him, was music first, and then whatever you please afterward, so long as it suggested, never told, some delicate sentiment, a sigh or a caress.

This leads the literary critic of The Evening Post to remark: "Mr. Symons compares Dowson's note with that of others; naturally, however, he does not point to his own verse as the closest