who is said to have given testimony that he was treated in this manner, denied the statement absolutely.

"Second, the members of the D. K. E. fraternity did not, as alleged, make inquiry as to the schedule of trains.

'Third, the bridge was not cleaned at the order of any group of students.

"Fourth, the bloody cloth which was found, but not hidden, in a culvert a quarter of a mile from the bridge, was worn by a student who had the nosebleed. This man was with Pierson's father.

The boy's death is a mystery, for the point to which he was sent is not on the bridge, nor is it a dangerous place in appearance. The only possible explanation is that the boy, who had been up all the night before waiting for his father, who arrived on a belated train, fell asleep, and waking suddenly, in confusion got into the path of the oncoming train."

N

PROSPECTS OF A LIVELY TIME IN
CONGRESS.

EWSPAPER forecasts show plenty of work for Congress to do this winter. With railroad questions, tariff revision, and reciprocity treaties, the investigation of the Panama Canal Commission and disturbances in the Isle of Pines, the ratification of the treaty with Santo Domingo, the Mormon issue and public lands scandals, the statehood bills and insular affairs, the canteen, pure food, immigration and Chinese exclusion laws, and measures seeking to secure a more elastic currency-with all these up for discussion and decision, it is thought that the coming session of Congress ought to attract a more than usual popular interest. The Washington Post (Ind.), however, after giving an elaborate résumé of the outlook, predicts that Congress will go slow, and act with conservatism, confining itself at the start "pretty much to routine work." The St. Louis Globe-Democrat (Rep.) also believes that it will be several months before any positive action is taken, for besides the topics mentioned, "the fourteen regular appropriation bills will have to be attended to.”

The questions which the press supposes will occupy most time and attention in Congress are those relating to the tariff and railroad rates. The papers which keep correspondents at the national capital are watching these questions with a keen and anticipative eye, for it is thought that the debate upon them will develop not only the political weakness or strength of President Roosevelt, but will show how far party lines have been loosened, and to what extent the new spirit of independence abroad in the land has taken hold on the legislative branch of the Government. According to most trustworthy accounts, the President will begin the fight for his pet subjects of legislation with more or less advantage over his opponents. His popularity in the House is unquestioned. It is surmised, however, that he will encounter considerable difficulty · in his efforts to make the Senate come around to his way of thinking, but nevertheless such an unfriendly critic as the New York Times (Ind. Dem.) makes this favorable assertion in its news columns regarding the fate of the President's railroad measures in the Senate:

66

President Roosevelt has won his first battle in his campaign against his Republican opponents in the Senate for railroad rate regulation, and he has won it by Democratic votes. It was made known definitely to-day that the Committee on Interstate Commerce, which is in session here on the rate question, will report a bill in accordance with the President's recommendations by a vote of 7 to 6 and perhaps of 9 to 4. He has seven votes certain. Two Senators, one a Republican and one a Democrat, are still noncommittal, but even if they decide against him he has a majority."

The New York Journal of Commerce (Fin.) takes a somewhat different view. It opines that " railroad legislation of some kind" will probably be adopted, but remarks through its Washington correspondent as follows:

"There is much reason to suppose that, during the coming winter, the main center of interest in Congressional action will be

located at the Senate end of the Capitol. Not only has the preponderating authority of the Senate been markedly increasing, even during the past three or four years, but at this particular session legislation of such a character is coming up that those interests which make the Senate their stronghold will undoubtedly do what they can to strengthen their grasp upon legislation and to keep it perfectly firm. There are some symptoms that these influences will be less obstreperous in a positive way than in the past, but it would also appear that what is lost in the direction of positive action will be gained in the vigor with which they will antagonize measures coming up from the lower chamber, or introduced by enemies in the upper, to which they feel serious objection."

As to tariff revision, The Journal of Commerce believes that the President" will let it drift, and that it will be pretty sure to do so during the coming session of Congress." This paper reaches this conclusion after reading an article in the New York Tribune (Rep.), which reports Mr. Roosevelt's sentiments as follows:

"The President appears to have discussed the subject of the tariff with extreme felicity in his forthcoming message, for members of Congress, both 'standpatters' and 'readjusters,' who say they have read the section dealing with this important subject, express themselves as well pleased with his utterance. It is asserted that the President frankly states his own opinion that there are certain schedules which call for some modification, expresses his confidence in the ability of Congress to deal adequately and efficiently with the subject when the proper time for such readjustment arrives, and adds that the subject is so delicate a one that he deems it best to leave to the discretion of the legislative body the determination of the time when such readjustment shall become imperative and the extent to which the modifications, when undertaken, shall go."

TOPICS IN BRIEF.

THE people of the Isle of Pines should join a Don't Pine club.-The Chicago Tribune.

MAYOR MCCLELLAN appears to have been reelected by a rousing minority.The Chicago Tribune.

As another bid for immigrants from the States, Canada proposes to put a ban on American cheap magazines.-The Washington Post.

THE Russian people are acting in a way to suggest that perhaps the world has somewhat misjudged the autocracy after all.-The Houston Post.

"BONAPARTE opposes a big navy." One of the Secretary's collateral ancestors had the same experience.-The Philadelphia North American. GREAT BRITAIN'S commission to investigate America's idiot asylums will not visit the city hall in an official capacity.-The Chicago Evening Post.

It seems strange that the Czar overlooked the opportunity of promising the Russians self-government as soon as they were capable of it.-The Commoner.

GOUT

THE

IF HE GETS IT, WHAT THEN?

-Rehse in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

LETTERS AND ART.

"THE GREATEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN BY A WOMAN."

ΤΗ

HE superlative statement is made of Emily Bronté's novel, Wuthering Heights," that it is "the greatest book ever written by a woman." This opinion is advanced by Clement K. Shorter in his new biography of Emily's sister, Charlotte, that appears in the series of "Literary Lives." Support seems to be given to Mr. Shorter's estimate in the progressive encomiums passed on the book, and quoted by him, since Sidney Dobell, a contemporary of the novelist, recognized its merits, and Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne continued the laudatory comment. Praise could perhaps go no higher than Mr. Swinburne's in placing "Wuthering Heights" alongside "King Lear," the "Duchess of Malfi," and "The Bride of Lammermoor." Mrs. Humphry Ward and Maurice Maeterlinck, though unquoted, are cited as joining in the chorus of praise."There are greater novels, doubtless," Mr. Shorter qualifies, "novels replete with humor and insight-qualities that it has not. But there is no book that has so entirely won the suffrage of some of the best minds of each generation since it appeared." Not to realize the high qualities of this masterpiece of fiction, says Mr. Shorter, "is to be blind indeed to all the conditions which go to make a great book." Accepting the dictum that the love for Milton's “ Lycidas” may be taken as the touchstone of taste in poetry, he does not hesitate to advance the parallel statement that the "appreciation of the Bronté novels may be counted as a touchstone of taste in prose literature." The wonder of "Wuthering Heights ” is enhanced by the insoluble mystery that shrouds the personality of its author. Mr. Shorter declares her to be as "impersonal as Shakespeare." Her failure to leave behind her any personal letters adds zest to the inquiry for which there is no satisfaction. Mr. Shorter writes:

"

"Not one scrap of self-revelation did Emily leave behind, two colorless letters to a friend of Charlotte's being wellnigh the only memorials in her handwriting that have been preserved. Her book also reveals nothing. Anne's novels were transparent transcripts from her narrow life. Charlotte transferred every incident from her experience into her books. Emily was never more aloof than in her great novel. It is dramatic, it is vivid and passionate, but it is never self-revealing. Emily learned German when in Brussels, and must have read the weird tales of Hoffman; she had, it may be, heard her father tell stories from Irish tradition, as Dr. Wright and Miss Mary Robinson both assert. She had, home, not only her own brother's miserable story with its mock heroics, but many other uncanny traditions of a kind to which Yorkshire is certainly as prone as County Down. Did she use any of these things? No one can say.

nearer

of tragic figures pass before us, and we are moved as in the presence of great tragedy. Emily Bronté was quite a young woman when she wrote this book. One almost feels that it was necessary that she should die. Any further work from her pen must have been in the nature of an anti-climax. It were better that 'Wuthering Heights' should stand, as does its author, in splendid isolation."

Lacking any adequate key to the mystery covering the source whence sprung this work of the author's genius, Mr. Shorter avers that we are thrown back upon nature as the only possible external influence-" those wild and silent moors that the writer loved so well, and where we are sure from earliest childhood she constantly kept solitary communion with all the weird phantasies

of her brain." Confronted by the fact that, viewed by the highest standards, the work of the other sisters, even that of Charlotte, must be taken in varying degrees of critical allowance, there is yet the problem of accounting for the "glamour" that surrounds everything that pertains to the name of Bronté. Mr. Shorter professes to find one clew in the very mystery of the personality of Emily— a mystery which he, the acknowledged authority on the Bronté literature, is obliged to state without explaining. He says:

"This element of mystery in all that concerned Emily Bronté, the absence of a single line from her to any correspondent furnishing some revelation of character, the non-existence even of a portrait bearing the faintest resemblance to her, the few casual glimpses of a personality that loved dogs more than human beings, of a nature that was quite unlike to many thousands of her fellow country women that were born into the world in these same days of the first quarter of the last century-all these, combined with the fact that every critic without exception that has been brought into contact with her poetry and prose has found it glorious, and you have here at least one element that provides a glamour to the story of the Brontés."

MUSICAL INTERPRETATION OF PICTURES.

NEW form of symphonic music, or a new development of program music," has been originated by a young French composer, Edouard Malherbe, a disciple of Massenet and Gabriel Fauré, whose compositions have been “crowned" by distinguished juries of musicians. He has carried out a theory that has long been under theoretical discussion and which concerns itself with the relation between color and music. If literature-poems, tales, legends, etc.—may provide material for "symphonic poems," why may not great pictures yield similar material? Malherbe has asked himself this question and answered it positively in a series of what he calls “musical tableaux." He has produced one work "after" or on Titian's famous picture, "Sacred and Profane Love," and another on Gleyre's "Lost Illusions.' His latest composition is an interpretation of "The Judgment of Paris," and it was recently performed at the Paris Opera-an unusual thing for that establishment, which, as a rule, never produces purely orchestral works.

Robert Brussel, the musical critic of Le Figaro, discusses the composition, with the idea underlying it, as follows:

“Literature has inspired a goodly number of symphonic poems; but the most interesting of them are those in which the poetic idea merely serves as the pretext or the general basis for the music; those in which the author's thought has no real influence on the particular development of the given theme. The symphonic poem was born the moment when the composer, not satisfied with purely musical development of the ideas of his dramatic or literary text, conceived the notion of giving them a sort of musical paraphrase or translation. This is what Beethoven did in his' Leonore' overture No. 3. But Beethoven, as well as Weber in his overtures, aimed essentially at the expression of sentiments and moods, or at the creation of an atmosphere. With Mr. Malherbe, the old controversy over program music is no longer even in question. He undertakes to give musical embodiment to plastic forms and images which the eye embraces at a glance. To realize these, he has recourse to the art of counterpoint. He introduces the six personages of the picture after a passage intended to represent glory. Venus, Pallas, Juno, Mercury, Paris, have each their several characteristic themes, and they are treated not successively, but simultaneously.

These themes are appropriate to the personages they depict, and are interwoven with remarkable ingenuity. Their rhythmic and melodic development is fluent and harmonious. And, in addition to a sure technic in the employment of all the resources of counterpoint, the composer has shown fine taste and ample invention in the use of orchestral color and timbre."

The critic goes on to say that it is impossible to describe the various subtle and happy combinations, the clever devices and the skill exhibited in the composition, and he has no doubt that Mr.

OTO KAWAKAMI AS THE GHOST.

Malherbe's talent is fruitful, original, and worthy of serious attention. Whether his departure will give symphonic music a permanent new form is, however, declared to be open to doubt.- Translation made for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

HOW THE JAPANESE "ADAPT"
SHAKESPEARE.

IN Russia Shakespeare has always been loved and appreciated

-a fact of which the educated Russians are rather proud, tho they are deeply attached to their own national drama. It is, perhaps, not without a touch of conscious "superiority" that a Russian woman, Mme. M. Danilevsky, contributes to the illustrated supplement of the St. Petersburg Novoe Vremya, a semihumorous but accurately descriptive article on "The Production of Shakespeare in Japan." The Japanese stage has been paying some attention of late years to European plays. Dumas's (fils) "Camille" has been repeatedly performed. Now Shakespeare has been attempted, and the first of his plays thus introduced to the Japanese was Hamlet." "Poor Yorick!" exclaims Mme. Danilevsky, and goes on to give the following account of the adaptation:

"

46

The The

"Everything about the atmosphere of the play is changed. Nothing is preserved except the bare skeleton of the plot. name of the hero is not Hamlet, but Toshimaro Hamura. action occurs in our own day and the scene is laid in Japan. 'Hamura is a scion of an ancient and aristocratic race. When his father, the old marquis, had died, somewhat strangely and mysteriously, Hamura's uncle had appropriated the brother's title, sword, and-wife. The young man, a graduate of the Tokyo University, who is in love with Oriye, the beautiful daughter of a man who is supposed to represent Polonius, suspects no foul play, and is reasonably happy.

"One day, while walking with a friend (Horatio) in the cemetery, his father's ghost, in full uniform, appears before him, and he learns the truth about the uncle's perfidy and his mother's sin and shame.

"He goes away-he travels in Manchuria and Siberia, but the crime gives him no rest. He returns; the ship in which he sails encounters a storm, but he reaches Japan in safety."

The plot develops along the familiar lines, but the characters,

the surroundings are realistically modern, and the Russian critic says that the impression produced is unpleasant and confused, as of something bizarre, incongruous, paradoxical.

"Othello" has also been adapted by the Japanese for their stage. But in the Moor's place we have a Governor-General of Formosa, whose origin is somewhat clouded, and Desdemona is replaced by the daughter of a Japanese minister of finance who opposes the union desired by the Governor-General and the girl and wishes to marry his daughter to the son of a bank director.

Dress, scenery, everything is in the latest fashion. As no highborn Japanese lady is permitted to sing a national song, the Japanese Desdemona has a graphophone in her bedroom!-Translation made for THE LITERARY DIgest.

German Praise for American Museums.-The importance ascribed by Professor Furtwängler to our art collections, in his recent report to the Munich Academy of Science on the collections of antiquities in the United States, is said to have caused some surprise in Europe. Professor Furtwängler is the celebrated archeologist whose judgment settled the dispute as to the genuineness of the tiara of Saitaphernes. From the account of his report published in Continental Correspondence (Berlin) we quote as follows:

"He shows that America not only possesses a great number but also in many instances very important antique treasures, and he especially praises the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which within a few decades has been developed in an admirable manner, and contains first-class treasures in nearly all departments. As examples, reference need only be made to the torsos of the two youths in the style of Praxiteles, in Boston. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is likewise highly appreciated, tho Furtwängler states that its terra-cotta is almost all spurious, but that it owns first-rate pieces in the wall paintings from Bosco Reale, in the newly acquired Ionic-Etruscan bronze ware, in the picture of Cybele on the car drawn by lions, in the Etruscan youth, etc. St. Louis, Chicago, Washington, and Baltimore have acquired-certainly together with much that is worthless-many valuable antiquities, more particularly vases, basins, amphora, etc.; and lastly, the Free Museum of Science and Art at Philadelphia is worthy of

note on account of its Babylonian inscriptions, its old Egyptian pieces (from Flinders Petrie), its treasures from Italian excavations and its antiquities from Cyprus. The final conclusion to be drawn from Furtwängler's studies is that there can no longer be any doubt that America's museum collections have emerged from the childhood stage and are rapidly approaching that of mature manhood."

WHERE MAN FAILS AS A NOVELIST.

WOMAN'S emotions may be analyzed and portrayed unerr

ingly by the male novelist, but woman's clothes, it appears, remain to him a mystery and a stumbling-block. Such, at least, is the assertion of Miss Myrtle Reed, herself a novelist, who is moved to mirth by the blunders of her brother-craftsmen when they plunge into the description of their heroines' attire. Among those whom she convicts of error in this important matter are Mr. Warner, Mr. Stewart Edward White, Mr. Richard Harding Davis, Mr. Payne, Mr. Zangwill, "J. P. M.," Mr. Arthur Stringer, and Mr. Thomas Dixon. Even Carlyle, she implies, suffers in authority when he ventures on this dangerous ground. We read:

Carlyle, after long and painful thought, arrives at the conclusion that 'cut betokens intellect and talent; color reveals temper and heart.' This reminds one of the language of flowers and the directions given for postage stamp flirtation. If that massive mind had penetrated further into the mysteries of the subject, we might have been told that a turnover collar indicated that a woman was a High Church Episcopalian who had embroidered two altar cloths, and that suede gloves show a yielding but contradictory nature. Once upon a time there was a notion to the effect that women dressed to please men, but it has long since been relegated to the limbo of forgotten things.

"Not one man in a thousand can tell the difference between Brussels Point at thirty dollars a yard and imitation Valenciennes at ten cents a yard, which was one of the 'famous Friday features in the busy bargain basement.' But across the room, yea, even from across the street, the eagle eye of another woman can unerringly locate the Brussels Point and the mock Valenciennes."

a

Man is given the credit for knowing silk by the "sound" and diamonds by the "shine," and will invariably describe a woman as "richly dressed in silk," and knows not that " white cotton shirtwaist represents luxury, and a silk waist of festive coloring abject poverty, since it takes but two days to 'do up' a white shirt-waist in one sense and thirty or forty cents to do it up in the other." Miss Reed continues her gleeful indictment, showing by quotation after quotation that men who write 'books are "at their wits' end regarding women's clothes." She says:

trimmed with roses for gardening, which Miss Reed declares no woman outside of an asylum ever donned for a hard day's work in her garden. In "The Story of Eva," the author, Mr. Payne, has Eva climb out of a cab in a "fawn-colored jacket" conspicuous by reason of its newness, and a hat with an owl's head on it. Miss Reed's version of the costume is as follows:

The jacket was probably a coat of tan covert cloth with strapped seams, but it is the startling climax which claims attention. An owl? Surely not, Mr. Payne! It may have been a parrot, for, once upon a time, before the Audubon Society met with widespread recognition, women wore such things, and at afternoon teas, where many fair ones were gathered together, the parrot garniture was not without significance. But an owl's face, with its staring, glassy eyes, is too much like a pussy cat's to be appropriate, and one could not wear it at the back without conveying an unpleasant impression of two-facedness, if the coined word be permissible.

'Still, the owl is no worse than the trimming of a model hat suggested by a funny paper. The tears of mirth come yet at the picture of a hat of rough straw, shaped like a nest, on which sat a full-fledged Plymouth Rock hen, with her neck proudly yet graciously curved. Perhaps Mr. Payne saw the picture and forthwith did something in the same line, but there is a singular inappropriateness in placing the bird of Minerva upon the head of poor Eva, who made the old, old bargain in which she had everything to lose and nothing save bitterest experience to gain. A stuffed kitten, so young and innocent that its eyes were still blue and bleary, would have been more appropriate on Eva's bonnet and just as pretty."

Our attention is called to the fact that in "The Wings of the Morning," Iris, in spite of the storm through which the Sirdar vainly attempts to make its way, appears throughout in a "lawn dress," and we are assured that it is white, since men in their books seem to follow Hoyle's instruction, "When in doubt, lead trumps," only Miss Reed thinks they have paraphrased it "When

"They are hampered by no restrictions; no thought of style or period enters into their calculations, and unless they have a wholesome fear of the unknown theme, they produce results which accentuate international gaiety. Many an outrageous garment has been embalmed in a man's book, simply because an attractive woman once wore something like it when she fed the novelist. Unbalanced by the joy of the situation, he did not accurately observe the garb of the ministering angel, and hence we read of a 'clinging white gown' in the days of stiff silks and rampant crinolines; of the curve of the upper arm when it took five yards for a pair of sleeves, and short walking skirts during the reign of bustles and trains."

Miss Reed advises Mr. Davis, author of "Captain Macklin," to learn of his friend Mr. Gisbon, that strenuous follower of millinery, as Mr. Davis puts his heroine in a thin white gown and a big hat

in doubt, put her into white lawn." Even
J. P. M., that gentle spirit to whom so many
hidden things were revealed, sent his shrew-
ish Kate off for a canter through the woods in
a white gown, which, if memory serves, was
lawn."
Whence, oh whence, she exclaims,
comes this fondness for lawn? 'Are not
organdies, dimities, and embroidered muslins
fully as becoming to women who trip daintily
through the pages of men's books? Lawn
has been a back number for many a weary
moon, and still we read of it!" Of the
sartorial ignorance of another novelist we
read:

"Mr. Dixon in 'The Leopard's Spots' has outdone every other knight of the pen who has entered the lists to portray women's clothes. Listen to the inspired description of 'Miss Sallie's' gown!

"She was dressed in a morning gown of a soft red material, trimmed with old cream lace. The material of a woman's dress had never interested him before. He knew calico from silk, but beyond that he never ventured an opinion. To color alone he was responsive. This combination of red and creamy white, with the bodice cut low, showing the lines of her beautiful white shoulders and the great mass of dark hair rising in graceful curves from her full round neck, heightened her beauty to an extraordinary degree. As she walked, the clinging folds of her dress, outlining her queenly figure, seemed part of her very being and to be imbued with her soul. He was dazzled with the new revelation of her power over him.'

"The fact that she goes for a drive later on, 'dressed in pure white,' sinks into insignificance beside this new and original creation of Mr. Dixon's. A red morning gown, trimmed with cream lace, cut low-ye gods and little fishes! Where were the authori

ties, and why was not 'Miss Sallie' taken to the detention hospital, pending an inquiry into her sanity?"

We are led to hope that these evils and incongruities will ultimately tend to disappear. That this may the sooner come about, Miss Reed suggests the addition of a supplementary course in millinery and dressmaking to the courses already planned in the new school of journalism which is to be attached to Columbia University.

DEPENDENCE OF LITERATURE UPON THE SUPERNATURAL.

MR.

R. CHARLES LEONARD MOORE, associate editor of the Chicago Dial, professes to see hope for our American literature in the fact that" under the shadow of our noble but rather prosaic Protestant religion an undergrowth of superstitions is springing up." Whatever is not touched by the imagination, says Mr. Moore, dies; and "the imagination is almost a vassal of the supernatural." While emphasizing the literary value of superstitions, he admits that he himself has no wish to revive compacts with the devil, or the burning of witches. Mr. Moore points out that our literature has been deficient in the element of supernaturalism, and finds in this the reason "why our national literature is so thin." He suggests that there has always been something in the air of America as fatal to superstition as the soil of Ireland is to snakes. Thus after Ponce de Leon's quest, and the witchfires of New England, he can discover hardly a gleam of the supernatural in our history. "Nothing, indeed, is more remarkable than the spectacle of a great people crushing its way over a continent, coming in contact with new scenes and strange experiences, yet evincing no excitement over the unknown, holding steadily to the practical and to the main chance." That is the reason, he says, why our national heroes are so impossible for poetry. On this point, writing in The Dial, he adds:

demonology, the writer turns to the Christian era; and to the attitude of individual writers toward the supernatural:

"For nearly two thousand years, Christianity, with its enormous mythology of spiritual and demoniac powers, its angelology, its hierarchies of saints and martyrs, its miracles and its remissions of sins, has filled the civilized world and satisfied man's sense of awe and worship. It has touched all acts with a wand of life, and caused them to blossom in prodigious efflorescence. The poems of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton, the Arthurian legends which it remodeled after its own image, the plays of Calderon and Shakespeare and Goethe and a myriad minor works, testify to its power. No other spiritual influence has had a tithe of its appraisable effect. . . . The Celtic supernatural comes out best as a kind of a glamour cast over nature. It suffuses the visible world with magic, but hardly concentrates into figures of commanding power. We know practically nothing about the Druidic cult, but it looms large as a thing of awe and mystery. Scotland, down to modern times, is a land of bogles, witches, warlocks, and worriecows. Scott and Burns came into a great inheritance of the supernatural, which they bettered and enlarged. It is hardly realized how much Scott was dominated by the mystery and magic of the spirit world. No English author save Shakespeare has so felt its power. He was accused of having a Meg Merrilies in every one of his books, after that impressive figure was first created. But his early poems show the trend of his imagination quite as distinctly.

Calderon has a figure in one of his plays called El Embozado, which has been the ancestor of a long and distinguished line in literature. In the original legend which Calderon used, a man is pursued wherever he goes by pieces of paper falling from the skies, on each of which he finds inscribed his own name. The hero of the play is haunted by a masked and cloaked figure which appears to him at all times and places. At last he turns upon it with his sword-they fight, and the intruder falls to the ground. He removes the mask from its face, and beholds-himself. There is a similar idea in a ballad of Gongora. A man is on his way to an assignation with a nun. He meets a funeral cortége, and

"The Indians whom we have dispossessed were a more imaginative race than ourselves, and a large part of such elevation and grandeur as does inhere in our literature is due to them. Our classic writers, indeed, were keenly alive to the value of the supernatural, and seized every possibility in our life that would give them a background of darkness, an air of mystery. Their successors have been in the main parochial and provincial. Their attitude toward the great ideas of the world reminds me of a story of a young woman of my neighborhood. Being asked to accompany some friends to Europe, she answered, hesitatingly, that she would like to go to Europe, she had heard a great deal of Europe, but she did hate to miss the Mt. Holly fair."

Even the rationalists and skeptics of the eighteenth century, we are told, were sound on the question of the supernatural in literature. "Voltaire, who believed in nothing, believed in ghosts for tragedy." The poets "thought that an array of contending gods and goddesses was a necessity which no sane person would question." Mr. Moore admits that the result, in many cases, was mere machinery, "a creaking soulless work of puppets and pulleys." Nevertheless, he adds, "their faith in it was a tribute to the highest instincts of mankind." And again: "They were right; without the supernatural in some shape, great literature, can hardly exist."

After glancing at the great racial literatures of mythology and

As already indicated, Mr. Moore cheerfully bases his hope on the very facts which seem to many a chief reason for discouragement. We read :

"But let us not give up hope. Under the shadow of our noble but rather prosaic Protestant religion, an undergrowth of superstitions is springing up. Pretty urban or rural customs, which have their root in Pagan observances, are being revived. The priestess of the Black Hills reads the stars for more folk than we imagine. Chiromancy, hypnotism, and mind-reading flourish. A young woman died in Philadelphia not long ago who gave out that she was the bride of Christ. Her followers believed in her to the extent of giving her a brick house. I have no desire to suggest that these things are good in themselves. But man must have some outlet into the unknown. We can not live by bread alone, nor subsist on a mental diet of stock reports, eulogies of the world's work, and speeches of strenuous politicians. Any change which will deepen our emotions and widen our intellects, must be for the better. And if such a change sets in, the literature which deals nobly with the supernatural must come into its own."