deeper set than the others. The child's face was yet undeveloped. These things might not be noticed for years and years, unless

Mixed with the sudden, overpowering horror of the revelation came a great surge of tenderness for this little one in his arms. He bent and kissed her, then put her gently down and turned to face the mother. A look of the eyes was all that passed between them, but in it there was understanding and resolution and heartbreak, all in one. "Goodbye," he said, quite steadily, after a moment. She gave him her hand in silence and he went out, groping his way as though it were dark. The child gazed after him in big eyed surprise. "When is he coming back, mamma ?" she asked wistfully. "Never," said the woman, and the child burst into tears. Louis J. Stellman

IN THE LOWER LEVEL

THE HE boss of the night shift and the man who hates him are descending the working shaft of the mine-together.

Darkness is all about them, so palpable, so dense that it strangles the breath on the lips of one unused to the darkness of the lower level. And the two are alone.

No premonition comes to the man in charge that a murderer in thought and intent is standing at his side; but had he been thus warned, he would not have betrayed the knowledge by so much as the quiver of an eyelash, for he knows not the meaning of the word fear.

The feeble, flickering light of the candles, that seems only to intensify the gloom, does not reveal the passion distorted face of the other to the man who stands at ease, carelessly humming a bar of a waltz he had heard somewhere-just where he does not remember. But the other remembers. Will he ever forget it?-Anita, his sweetheart, in the Ameri

cano's arms, and the music playing on, and on, and on

He will strangle the object of his hate, there in the blackness of the lower level. But no! when the bucket is half way up he will catch him off guard and pitch him out, to be crushed like an egg shell on the timbering of the shaft. Meanwhile, to the task at hand.

It is the work of a moment to put in the three shots of giant powder, ready for firing.

The snuffs under the fuses are lighted, and the men spring into the bucket and give the signal to hoist.

The bucket ascends, stops with a jerk, and begins to settle slowly to the bottom. Signal after signal goes up, and still the bucket sags toward the blast.

Fifty seconds have not elapsed since the lighting of the snuffs, but in another second the powder in the fuse will ignite!

The man with murder in his heart smiles grimly, for he, too, knows not the meaning of the word fear.

They will go together, then! It is well. Life without her would not be life, and- What is it that el Americano is saying?

"Somethin' wrong with th' engines. God help my wife an' th' little uns!" With a bound the other leaps to the bottom of the dump, and makes a run for the nearest fuse that is spitting a warning at him. He reaches it, and dashes out the snuff with his cap. Two more shots remain, set close together.

NORTON'S DANTE

WHAT

HAT a joy it is to handle--and handle as one's own-a well bred book; one that's plain of cover, that opens graciously, that meets you frankly with clear, honest type and generous margins! Times are tawdrier now than back in past days, perhaps, but they are franker, too. All that is simple and of good taste in modern book making has entered into the making of these three volumes of Norton's Dante. I must confess to more than a moment's joy in simply feeling such books as these, merely opening them.

And how Nortonesque they are! As if they had just left the old professor's quiet library. And so they have, bringing with them some of that quiet, that reverence and religiousness which is the atmosphere, the only atmosphere breathed by a ripe scholar and man of letters. For ten years past Professor Norton has been brooding over the great Tuscan's world poem, and this is the result. Ten years ago he published the best prose translation that had ever been made. Ten years of further study into the deep, dark things of the original, years. of weighing of words and sifting of notes, has given us not only a new edition, revised, but a prose translation of Dante as nearly perfect as a translator will ever make it. Norton's Dante is destined to become the classic translation in English.

This is one of the few great books needed in every household library.

"Not how many, but how good books," is the motto for the private library. I once heard Professor Norton, in a quiet talk to a graduate club at Harvard, say that the books of the world that one needed to know were very few-only the great classics: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Job, Isaiah and half a dozen others. To know these (and how mighty few modern readers do!) is equal to a college course: is a liberal education.

The Divine Comedy in Italian is a closed book to most of us. We must have it in English. Shall we own one of the many translations in verse or this best one in prose?

We think of Dante as among the divinest of poets and we can scarcely bring ourselves to read him in prose. The loss is so great that the reading seems hardly worth while, it becomes a task, and we naturally turn to some of our English poets for a version of the great poem. We shall be disappointed. A translation at best is but a warming over, and such is the nature of great poetry that in turning it into poetry in a different tongue, the better the turning the less like the original it is. Pope's "Iliad" is but one instance of this. "The coalescence of the music and the meaning of the verse, in the perfection of which the life of poetry consists, cannot be transferred from one tongue to another. A new harmony may be substituted, but the difference is fatal. The translation may have a life of its own, but it is not the

life of the original," says Professor Norton in his preface.

But some of the great world poems are great aside from their purely poetical qualities. We read some for their thought as well as for their music. The Divine Comedy is first among the deeply intellectual and emotional poems of the world. Our interest is often all in the soul of this man whom we find "midway in the journey of life," rather than in the lights and shadows of his way. It is the thought, the soul of the poem we get at in Professor Norton's translationbut that soul clothed in the simplest, purest, most classical English.

If we needed fresh proof of the supreme interest in the meaning of The Divine Comedy we have it in the fact that Mr. C. A. Dinsmore's The Teachings of Dante has run into the third edition in less than a year. This remarkable study was reviewed in the National hardly more than six months ago.

In Professor Norton's perfect text and Mr. Dinsmore's new religious interpretation, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. have done as much for the study of Dante as any publishing house will do, perhaps, in the coming century.

Dallas Lore Sharp

THE DIVINE COMEDY OF DANTE, translated by Charles Eliot Norton. (Revised edition) Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1902.

It is indeed the true reason of all art. But it is the novel that I am considering just at present. And I would not wish to be suspected, even momentarily, of pessimism in endeavoring to extend the moral to fit the situation of the moment. For it is novels that we are reading now almost wholly. We appear to be mad over fiction. It has come upon us with a rush, like a flood, within the past half decade; we are quite overwhelmed by it. For the first time in the history of letters, it has come to be, and at once, not in the least a question of authors, or of plots, or scenario. We accept everything, anything, so long as the story pleases. The tale's the thing!

Twenty years ago, and even less, we insisted solemnly upon the moral purpose in fiction. Now we ask only for genius in story stelling. Fiction seems to have become, in an intimate sense, the toy of civilization. But it is much more than that, if we look a little deeper. And is not all this just exactly as Burne

nature never changes, but men and manners do; and we can scarcely hope to find an intimate picture of our sorrows and emotions in the fortunes of Dorothy Vernon or of Audrey. We have gotten at a bound beyond that first fine stage and we read anyhow, avidly, carelessly, rapturously but read we must. The immediate underlying motive in the present instance is the conditions of our daily life. It is an era of sordid achievement that forces us to the theatre, the

music room, the printed page for a breathing space. And of all means of entertainment the book is the readiest. So the publisher looks only to the novels for his reward; the critical journals, with their tables of best selling books, are wholly given up to it; and it has come to pass, when we speak of books nowadays, that we refer inevitably to the latest fiction.

Here is, perhaps, the most hopeful general sign of the times. Better that the whole world should read novels-and there is a surprisingly large number of clever ones than that it should not read at all. For books have been, since the beginning of them, rather the possesion of the few than the resource of the many. And the world is yet an infant, and it is learning as a whole world to read, for it appears now to have, for the first time, in the broadest sense, the opportunity to gratify its desire. And as natural as mother's milk in this situation is the novel: So we may very well accept the flood of fiction that is now upon us as the first sign of a genuine general enlightenment in the history of the human race. Joseph Lewis French

KIPLING, BODY SNATCHER THE alienists of a future age will pro

claim Mr. Rudyard Kipling to have been the most distinguished criminal of our own. True, it is not said he has committed any act now legally a crime; but, as men progress morally, the category of crimes is added to: a deed tolerable yesterday is a crime today. Mr. Kipling's crimes are of the sort not yet legally designated as such, though already so recognized by the best intelligence of the age and abhorrent to the spirit of the cultivated minority.

The character of Mr. Kipling's crimes will become apparent to the reader of his written works-or, to be quite exact, will become apparent to some readers of

some of his written works. For the popularity of many of his written works -savage, vulgar, un-Christian,-can be explained by no other hypothesis than that the majority of his readers are not yet sufficiently civilized to recognize his crimes as crimes. And in a few-a very few of his works, the criminal tendency does not appear.

Turning for a time from lesser offences, Mr. Kipling has made his debut as a body snatcher-a defamer of dead men. His victim in this instance is the poet John Keats. In a short story, Wireless, published in the August number of Scribner's Magazine, Mr. Kipling has exploited, for his own pocket profit, the forgotten frailties of the earlier poet. This exploit is aptly characterized by Henry B. Fuller, novelist and critic, in the Chicago Evening Post. Thus:

"When Rudyard Kipling laid his unmannerly hand on John Keats he made a mistake. His recent magazine story, "Wireless," which jumbles the poetry and personality of Keats into a sort of pseudo-scientific fantasy, makes flagrant. inroads on good taste and right feeling. Kipling himself is an incarnation of the rowdyism of rampant democracy, but here he has pushed his coarse grained modernity too far and has ridden to a fall.

"It is not Keats that he has hurt; it is the feelings of every sensitive reader. He seems to have thought that Keats was a mere person, and that, as such, he might unceremoniously be made into copy. But Keats long ago passed beyond that stage. He lives now not as an individual, but rather as a type, and as such should remain free from degrading assault and from vulgar contamination. He is the symbol of the all-gifted and unfortunate and unappreciated young poet, dead in his flower. To prejudice the integrity of such a type as this is as bad as to clip a coin or to falsify the stamp that strikes it. Symbols are the very food of the race. He who attacks one cuts away life's staff from beneath our hand.

"Man, in the last analysis, as the German thinkers say, is an idealist-profoundly, incorrigibly, inevitably so. And

TABLOID CLASSICS SLOWLY but surely the shadows of

oblivion creep up to obscure the works of even our greatest men. The very pressure of new talents, interpreting a new era, and demanding recognition, crowds old talents, interpreting other eras, into the darkness at the nether marge of time. Little by little the works of the great dead become obsolete and are forgotten. The anthology contains. the names and surviving poetic fragments of hundreds of singers who filled impressive volumes in their own days. Only the curious and industrious scholar, compiling long lists of dead volumes and obscure dates, finally recalls to an indifferent world the prodigies performed by his hero of yesterday. The average reader wants only the best of any man or group of men. Even Shakespeare and the Bible have fallen into this category: we have shrewd critics naming in a list of the world's best writings, not the Bible as a whole, but the Book of Isaiah, or the Book of Job, or the Songs of Solomon, or the Psalins of David. The shrewd publisher, recognizing this drift of the time, this natural result of the multiplication of duties and pleasures that beset us,-resorts to compilations of "the best" of this author and of the other, not merely introducing us, but

giving us in brief compass the loftiest thought, the purest style of the writer in question.

Thus, L. C. Page & Co., of Boston, have begun a new series. The first volume is The Best of Balzac, and includes seven selections from his novels and stories. The second volume, just out, is The Best of Stevenson, which embodies selected essays, stories and poems. Each volume contains also a complete list of the author's writings, a critical survey of his work and a portrait. Most of us, having so much to see and to dc, in a life so short, desire no more of any man than this. Arthur Mcllroy

JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA THE second of the dozen volumes which

are to constitute The Jewish Encyclopedia embraces 1,600 articles and carries its wonderful story of Jewry's deeds and dreams, its men and its institutions, some distance into the second letter of the alphabet. No other work of equal scope or historical importance has been undertaken in our time. This work, the joint product of 400 celebrated scholars cooperating under the leadership of Dr. Funk and having at command all the physical and financial resources of the house of Funk, Wagnalls & Co., maintains in its second volume the lofty spirit and style that characterized the first. It becomes more than ever apparent that this is to be a product lacking which no student's library can be complete. This fact alone would not entitle it to be classed as true literature; but, such is the quality of much of its contents, that it does in fact attain this ultimate and enduring distinction. In a period when criticism is perforce extraordinarily busy with fiction, this Encyclopedia has received unstinted praise in every center of civilization throughout the world. Martin Murray