the same shelf as historical novels---they are of that species of half truths that do more harm than a frank falsehood. More than once have intelligent Frenchmen told me that in their hearts they prayed for an understanding with their German friends across the border, but that no newspaper had the courage to voice this sentiment-least of all a minister with political ambition.

When I broached the question of a United States of Europe, it was received as something too good, too heavenly to be realized by mortals. Every child that crosses America recognizes the immense advantage which lies in the mere absence of custom houses-and every German now sees that the present greatness of his country is largely owing to the abolition of customs friction within the empire. Belle-mere and beau-pere the whole family, which, to my mind, is a composite picture of intelligent France, raised in one voice innumerable objections to any such a scheme.

We welcome them all, we make their life as agreeable as possible, but we remain French.

As I jogged back to Paris that evening, the train again was filled. Laughing men and maidens, with empty baskets and happy hearts, returning from a day in the country well prepared to take up, on the morrow, the burdens they had cast away the night before.

From the tops of the Rocky mountains, gazing across thousands of miles of railway tracks, we look upon the little mediæval patchwork called Europe as a picturesque paradox-a super-civilized. slice of the world, tottering under taxes for military purposes and ruining itself industriously by persistency in governmental methods which the United States abandoned on adopting the Constitution of 1789. Uncle Sam is calmly planning the commercial conquest of Europe; nay, is already dividing the spoils. Our wealth has no limit; our millionaires choke every millinery and jewelry shop in the Rue de la Paix. The Parisian is so busy taking in American money that he can hardly wait upon his own customers from the provinces.

Meanwhile, belle-mere sits at the head of her table in the midst of her family and talks of America as complacently as we talk of Mars or a tribe in the interior of New Guinea. Belle-mere does not complain, for she does not envy us our gaudy gowns nor our check books. Why should she? She has the lunch basket and the jovial laugh. While these last, France can snap her fingers at all the world outside.

Walt Whitman

A fence around thy garden patch! For lo! a strenuous hen is loose

Exerting all her wits and powers, To work grave damage and abuse

Upon thy beds of precious flowers! She has an ever restless claw

Guard well thy clumps of tender prose! And most insatiate is her maw

Protect thy verse in even rows! She heeds not how thy posies grow, Of bud or bloom she does not reck; She cares for naught on earth belowBut just to peck-and just be Peck! On tender plants and slender shoots, She wages war- in search for slugs; She scratches out the very roots

In delving deep for grubs and bugs. If one she finds that's big and fat,

She crows as she would split her neck! A sober hen to act like that

Impeccable Pec-uliar Peck!

Her sight is poor; she can't oft'timesThough she'd not own it-nay, not she!

Tell vague and hazy frozen rimes,

From straight and stalwart poet-tree. With self-complacent smirk or smile,

She strains her eyes, for spot or speck; Tis worth a journey, mile on mileTo see dear old Pedantic Peck!

PROFESSOR WOODBERRY'S

"HAWTHORNE"

A NUMBER of excellent books have

been written about Hawthorne. Some of them are principally devoted to biography; others to criticism. Professor Woodberry's, although leaning by preference to the side of intellectual analysis, is the best proportioned life of the novelist yet written: the book is concise, sympathetic and adequate.

It is difficult to say anything new or illuminating about Hawthorne's character and genius. The subject has been threshed over by two generations of sophomores, space writers, and savants: and all we know even now is little more than the fact of the great romancer's illusiveness and baffling originality. Professor Woodberry comes

to the

task well equipped. He is one of the most versatile men now living. Not only is he a shrewd critic and charming essayist; he has produced, in the life of Edgar Allen Poe, one of the most noteworthy of American biographies, and has earned in more than one volume of verse his right to the name of poet. Clear eyed, and dowered with imaginative sympathy, he is singularly well fitted to write of the man who has possessed, unless we except Poe, the most mysterious and complex personality among the great authors of our country.

One of the admirable gifts of this biographer is his instinct for selecting the significant detail. In the limits of the three hundred pages which must suffice for contributions to the American Men of Letters series, he cannot, of necessity, add incident to incident, as an artist adds line to line, until he thus builds up an unforgettable portrait; he must rely on little suggestive touches. And it must be admitted that this method has its advantages. Whole pages about the delicate purity of Hawthorne's love for Sophia Peabody, for instance, would be less effective than the single confession of the lover, quoted on page ninetynine, that he "always washed his hands before reading her letters." Other illustrations might be cited of this gift of intuitive choice among the bewildering mass of materials at the author's disposal: it amounts almost to genius.

The spirit of Woodberry's Life is that of warm and admiring appreciation, but it no-where takes the color of indiscriminate eulogy. The picture of Hawthorne as the ideal husband and father is sympathetically drawn, but one is impressed equally with the fact that the novelist was over sensitive, adverse to criticism, and sometimes irritable to the point of irascibility. He was not even above revenging himself on neighbors and townsmen whom he disliked, by way of thinly disguised caricature.

In his estimate, also, of the value of Hawthorne's literary work, Professor Woodberry is nothing if not cautious. Hawthorne's shorter tales, according to our critic, were frequently marred by provincialism, and showed a lack "of urban ease, certainty, and perfection of manner." His early descriptive sketches, while revealing acute ocular observation, are curiously like school-boy compositions on a glorified scale. "It is in the historical tales that his imagination first acts with seeing power. . . The composition, the development, the focusing, are in Scott's manner: it is from him that this dramatic presentation of history in a single scene or by a succession of scenes, carrying on a story, is derived; partly pictorial, partly theatrical, always dramatic; this is the method which Hawthorne applied, the art of the author of Waverly, who was its great master in English fiction. . . . It will be observed that Hawthorne reached artistic consciousness and the mastery of aim and method slowly and along no one line of development; rather his genius seemingly put forth many tendrils, seeking direction and support and growth, and gradually in these hundred tales he found himself and his art." Professor Woodberry, after speaking of the idea of isolation and solitude common to these briefer stories, continues: "The most surprising thing, however, is that his genius is found to be so purely objective; he himself emphasized the objectivity of his art. From the beginning, as has been said, he had no message, no inspiration welling up within. him; no inward life of his own that sought expression. He was not even introspective. He was primarily a moralist, an observer of life, which he saw as a thing of the outside; and he was keen in observation, cool, interested. If there was any mystery in his tales, it was in the object, not in the author's breast; he makes no confessions either

Professor

Woodberry's most note

worthy and original criticism is contained in his estimate of The Scarlet Letter, a work generally conceded to be the greatest of American novels. He takes issue with the common verdict in the following trenchant paragraph: "The romance is a partial story, an imperfect fragment of the old life, distorting not so much the Puritan ideal-which were a little matter - but the spiritual life itself. Its truth, intense, fantastic, terrible as it is, is a half truth, and the darker half; it is the shadow of which the other half is light; it is the wrath of which the other half is love. A book from which light and love are absent may hold us by its truth to what is dark in life, but in the highest sense, it is a false book."

The Marble Faun, on the other hand, "is perhaps Hawthorne's most complete expression of life.

Hawthorne's personality pervades it like life in a sensitive hand. It is the best and fullest and most intimate expression of his temperament, of the man he had come to be, and takes the imprint of his soul with minute delicacy and truth. It is a meditation on sin, but so made gracious with beauty as to lose the deformity of its theme; and it suffers a metamorphosis into a thing of loveliness."

The total effect of this biography is that of cordial while tempered praise. Woodberry is right in making the secret of Hawthorne's true greatness rest in his "intense self-consciousness of life in the soul-in a word, spirituality of life,"

was perforce imaginatively reflected in his writings. "The moral world, the supremacy of the soul's interests, how life fares in the soul, was his region; he thought about nothing else." And yet his perfect domestic life, sanctitified by a love which suggests instant comparison with that of Robert Brown

truly a field for wondering and grateful admiration than his remarkable intel

lectual gifts. Professor Woodberry closes his volume with these words: "Perhaps even more than his genius, the sweetness of his home life with her (his wife) as it is so abundantly shown in his children's memories, lingers in the mind that has dwelt long on the story of his life." F. L. K. BOSTON.

MAXIMILIAN IN A POETIC DRAMA

N these days of literary charlatanism and slight achievement, a genuine, serious effort in the art of writing is a rarity. In these days, also, of greater or less subservience to the classical in the line of dramatic art it takes courage to write a drama and choose for its characters men and women who figured in the history of recent years.

In these days, also, of a dearth of genuine poetry it is uncommon to find any man attempting a drama in blank verse-here in America at least. Since Boker's Francesca da Rimini we have had Elwyn Barron's The Viking, Henry Guy Carleton's Memnor and what else?

Now comes Edgar Lee Masters of Chicago with a five-act tragedy, entitled Maximilian, in English heroic verse. Mr. Masters is already known to the world of letters by a volume of poems and by much other writing. The play is founded on the world known coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon III., in making Maximilian emperor of Mexico. The flight of Carlotta, the execution of Maximilian and his Mexican subordinates. the treachery of Bazaine and the expulsion of the French troops from Mexico by the United States government comprise the main features of the drama.

The author has constructed upon these materials a genuine play. It is not par

ticularly a play for the closet, but more especially for the stage. The action is spirited, strong and clean cut, and holds firm to the very last. The characters, especially Maximilian, Carlotta and Bazaine, are vigorously and splendidly drawn. The blank verse is of a very high order indeed, and when Mr. Masters occasionally allows his characters any speeches of length they are notable examples of high poetry.

There is powerful argument throughout against imperialism, and in the conversation between Bazaine and Labastida the process by which stronger governments become embroiled with weaker ones is thus set forth:

BAZAINE "This country owes us money," cries the

The major events of Maximilian's career in Mexico are given. Minor events may or may not be, so far as this drama is concerned, a faithful following of historic truth. But, in my opinion, in Maximilian there has been produced a blank verse drama equal to Boker's Da Rimini in construction, action, delineation of character and poetry; and excelling Boker's fine tragedy in vital human interest. It is entirely problematical to my mind whether this play will receive the credit to which it is entitled; whether the critic will care for it; whether the public will read it; and whether it will be staged at an early day. But this, it seems to me, is at least sure, that Mr. Masters has written a fine and splendid drama, and that his characters are real creations, not manikins; that he has been brave enough to eschew the classics and take his material at first hand and not from the tombs of mythology; that he has power as a dramatist and certainly rich gifts as a poet.

CHICAGO.

Ernest McGaffey

THE IMPORTANCE OF

NATURAL

FEW

FOOD

W books published during the last year have exercised a more potent influence for good than Wisdom and Foolishness, by Henry D. Perky, founder and president of Oread Institute, at Worcester, Massachusetts, and president of the Natural Food Company, whose establishment is one of the show places at Niagara Falls. Mr. Perky's book deals with the subject of foods, and for its sound sense and simplicity deserves to be read and consulted by everyone, especially by women, who, as the cooks of the world, control the world's health and accelerate or retard its progress. Within a hundred pages the author has compressed more practical and inspirational suggestions on the business of