and the story is written throughout with unflagging enthusiasm. The motive is simple and inspiring, the series of pictures varied and finished. How far the allegorical tendencies of these romances are to be pushed is a question which hardly calls for a categorical reply. "The Story of the Glittering Plain" lends itself readily to a consistent interpretation which can hardly have been entirely absent from its author's intention. "The Roots of the Mountains" was, we are told, the best of the romances in Morris's opinion. The last of them, "The Sundering Flood," may surely receive a high meed of praise. The allegory, if allegory there be, is not forbidding in its difficulty, nor carried out with undesirable minuteness. The conquest of love and faith over seemingly insuperable obstacles is made plain and convincing; the heroism of Osberne shines like that of Sigurd himself; the counsellor and guide, Steelhead, is not an altogether mysterious personage; and the final return to the simple and wholesome life of the dalesman, from the complications of a civilization not conscious of itself or its needs, points a moral and adorns a tale. With "The Water of the Wondrous Isles one may perhaps be pardoned for having some questionings; although no one need have any questionings as to the heroine, Birdalone, in her courage and her womanliness. Nor will one have any questionings in regard to the springlike freshness which pervades the entire story, the wealth of incident, the clearness of description, the exhaustless resources of an imagination which knows no such thing as weariness. Still, the voyage from island to island of the wondrous sea has more of the allegorical about it than the sundering flood, and the magical element in the book removes it more from the prosaic sympathies of the day. No one need, however, take the whole as other than it presents itself to be; and then, the narrative is admirable. Through the various trials of inexperience, the girl Birdalone, helped by the mystical wood-mother Habundia, passes, and in her triumphs uplifts with herself all those with whom she comes in contact. The indescribable charm and atmosphere of the art of William Morris are over both books, and one may as well surrender at discretion to that magic and influence. The founder of the Kelmscott Press would gladly hold in his hand these volumes, such fine exemplars of the printer's art are they. If a good story ought to have a goodly investiture, it has been given in the present instance; and the fortunate possessor of these romances will not only have two beautiful books, but two happy specimens of the work of a man whose recognition as one of the leaders of his time, and a benefactor of the race, is assured. LOUIS J. BLOCK. MEXICO THROUGH FRIENDLY EYES.* Mr. Lummis is always enthusiastic: he loves or he loves not. And just now his love is Mexico, and in "The Awakening of a Nation" he gives us some striking and suggestive sketches. He sees much to admire in Mexico, and a great part of what he admires is due to Spanish influence. This is unwelcome just now when it is the fad to hate and despise Spain and the Spaniard. But, after all, hatred and contempt alter no facts; and it is true that the Spaniard has been a wonderful explorer, a not unkind conqueror, and a marvellously good governor, more than once. "His marca is upon the faces, the laws, the very landscape. How significant this is, we may better judge when we remember that the Saxon, masterful though he is, has never anywhere achieved these results. He has filled new lands with his speech and his faith (or his lack of it), but only by filling them with his own blood, never by changing the native. The United States, for English? In the vastly greater area of Spanish Amerinstance, is of his speech; but what Indian tribe speaks ica, every Indian tribe speaks Spanish and has done so for centuries. The Saxon has never impressed his language or his religion upon the people he has overrun." It was that same Spaniard in America who developed in Mexico a golden age of letters in the sixteenth century, long before Plymouth Rock felt pilgrim footsteps. Mr. Lummis does well to hint at this. "The Bay Psalm-Book" was not the first book printed in America, nor were "The Jesuit Relations "the "very first beginnings of American literature." How naïve and amusing such claims would be, were they not humiliating evidence of narrow ignorance! The first American books were in Spanish, of course; and they represent a great variety in subject, treatment, and character. Some features of that early literature are most curious. Thus, as Mr. Lummis says: "Another striking point in the literary history of Mexico and one wholly without parallel in ours-is this: in the first generation after the Conquest there was already in Mexico a band of Indian authors like Tobar, Zapata, Tezozomoc, Chimalpain, Camargo, Pomar, the *THE AWAKENING OF A NATION: MEXICO OF TO-DAY. By Charles F. Lummis. New York: Harper & Brothers. Ixtlilxochitls, and others, whom no student of Americana can ignore." How can we fit this with our narrow prejudice: "It is curious to remember that up to 1830 no book was ever so handsomely published in the United States as the Lorenzana edition of the 'Letters of Cortez,' in Mexico in 1770." We have called the sixteenth century a golden age of letters in Mexico. It was such. At that time there was there poetry of a high order; there was history, chronicle, belles-lettres; there was philosophy and theology; there was science and very creditable science too. The University of Mexico was flourishing and turning out brilliant scholars long before Harvard was dreamed of. Model industrial schools with hundreds of Indian pupils, where not only theory but trades were taught, grew up under devoted friars. Even schools for the careful study of the native Indian tongues existed, and a college of twenty diligent students studying the Otomi language had been established in the Indian town of Huiskelucan. But Mr. Lummis does not unduly linger over the past. He deals with Mexico of to-day an awakened nation. One of his first assertions will come with a shock to our prejudice and ignorance. "To-day Mexico is—and I say it deliberately the safest country in America. Life, property, human rights, are more secure than even with us." This is the Mexico of to-day, not the Mexico of twenty years ago. Few realize the vast changes of a single year in our sister republic. Yet Mr. Lummis's statement might have been made, in fact it was made, years ago. In London, in 1892, I heard a prominent man lecture on Mexico. He said: "Many consider Mexico dangerous, believe that life and property are not secure. I know well all parts of the United States, and do not hesitate to say that life and property are more secure in every part of Mexico than in any of the United States." I felt that this was the rabid utterance of a prejudiced Englishman,— but I did not then know Mexico. He emphasizes, and with the highest justice, the fact that this mighty progress is chiefly due to one person not only a great Mexican, but a great man-Porfirio Diaz, the President of the Republic. He sketches the romantic career of this man in whose hands the national destiny has so long rested. We do not grudge one word of praise to Diaz; he deserves it. But we might wish that our author had a little more emphasized the work of that inscrutable Indian, Juarez, to whom personally and polit ically Diaz owes so much. We will quote but one more passage from our author: it is not simply captious. "It is notorious to those who know both countries thoroughly, that educated Americans are far more ignorant of Mexico than educated Mexicans are ignorant of the United States. One reason is, doubtless, that we are the more shining mark; but another is that the Latin-American nations have rather different ideas of a diplomatic service. They do not send to any country an ambassador who will be lost there without an inter preter. Even down to consuls, this ridiculous superstition is operative. Men are selected who are at least gentlemen in appearance; who can command the respectful attention of business men; who know how to ask for the information they desire. The result is that Mexico is steadily informed of the moods and needs of this country." A pity 't is 't is true. FREDERICK STARR. RECENT BOOKS OF ENGLISH POETRY.* It is not often that lovers of literature in its highest forms look forward to the publication of any book with the eagerness that has awaited the appearance of the long-promised volume of poems by Mr. *THE COMING OF LOVE, and Other Poems. By Theodore Watts-Dunton. New York: John Lane. POEMS. By Stephen Phillips. New York: John Lane. THE HOPE OF THE WORLD, and Other Poems. By William Watson. New York: John Lane. THE EARTH BREATH, and Other Poems. By A. E. New York: John Lane. POEMS OF A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. By Sir George Douglas, Bart. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co. ADMIRALS ALL, and Other Verses. By Henry Newbolt. New York: John Lane. Mr. Lummis treats of the natural resources of the country, describes the ferment now leading to their development, and shows how a financial condition which would paralyze us has been to Mexico, with her different conditions, a helpful stimulus. He gives glimpses of the great enterprises now undertaken. The old mining industry, once the great wealth of the country, is still important, but will soon be insignificant when compared with the agricul- edited by William Michael Rossetti. New York: Longmans, THE FAIRY CHANGELING, and Other Poems. By Dora Sigerson (Mrs. Clement Shorter). New York: John Lane. FROM THE HILLS OF DREAM. Mountain Songs and Island Runes. By Fiona Macleod. Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes & Colleagues. IRELAND, with Other Poems. By Lionel Johnson. Boston: Copeland & Day. tural, manufacturing, and carrying industries. POEMS. By William Ernest Henley. New York: Imported by Charles Scribner's Sons. A SELECTION FROM THE POEMS OF MATHILDE BLIND. Edited by Arthur Symons. London: T. Fisher Unwin. POEMS BY THE LATE JOHN LUCAS TUPPER. Selected and Green, & Co. Theodore Watts-Dunton. His occasional contributions of verse to "The Athenæum," together with the few pieces that have already found their way into the anthologies, have served to whet to a keen edge the interest of literary students, who have long felt it a wrong to letters that a poet of such extraordinary critical acumen and technical mastery of the art of rhythmical expression should remain unknown save to the few who had tracked him to his haunts. Two or three years ago, the announcement was made that his poems were at last to be produced by his friend William Morris in a Kelmscott volume, and the interest of book-lovers was all agog at the prospect. The untimely death of Morris put an end to this project, and affected Mr. Watts-Dunton in a way of which he must be allowed to speak for himself. "Among the friends who saw much of that great poet and beloved man during the last year of his life, there was one who would not and could not believe that he would die myself. To me he seemed human vitality concentrated to a point of quenchless light; and when the appalling truth that he must die did at last strike through me, I had no heart and no patience to think about anything in connection with him but the loss that was to come us." The next year, nevertheless, the writer upon put forth in a thin booklet his superb "Jubilee greeting at Spithead to the Men of Greater Britain," a poem which gives impassioned embodiment to the patriotic sentiment of the occasion by which it was inspired, and which is equalled-we hardly dare to say surpassed-only by the "Recessional" of Mr. Kipling. This publication gave us at least a foretaste of what might be expected from "The Coming of Love, and Other Poems," the volume which has at last seen the light. It is safe to say that this volume is one of the strongest and most original contributions to literature that have been made of recent years, and that there is no living English poet save only Mr. Swinburne from whose hands we might expect a gift of greater and more lasting value. Mr. Watts-Dunton drinks from his own glass, which is both wide-brimmed and ample; and his utterance, whatever may be its subject, has the touch of high distinction that marks the difference between the artists and the mechanics of verse. In its choice of subject, indeed, the art of the poet is put to the severest of tests in the titular poem, which fills about a third of the volume, and is a sequence of sonnets, lyrics, and dramatic episodes which tell of the poet's love for the gypsy maiden Rhona. This maiden is absolutely unlettered, and much of the story is told in her own words, including a plentiful infusion of Romany Vocables and uncouth English phrases. No more unpromising material than this could well be imagined, yet the result impresses the reader first and last as poetry of a high order. Let us quote two stanzas from Rhona's letter to her absent lover. "She The whinchat soon wi' silver throat sez, Will meet the stonechat in the buddin whin, And soon the blackcap's airliest gillie 'ull float "The thought on't makes the snow-drifts o' December Shine gold,' I sez, 'like daffodils o' spring Wot wait beneath: he's comin, pups, remember; If not-fer me no singin birds 'ull sing: No choring chiriklo 'ull hold the gale Wi' 'Cuckoo, cuckoo,' over hill and hollow; There'll be no crakin o' the meadow-rail, There'll be no 'Jug-jug' o' the nightingale, For her wot waits the comin o' the swallow.'" "The Coming of Love" as a whole is difficult to characterize. It is too episodical to form a continuous story, yet it has emotional unity, and this tragedy of the soul, passing from the careless joy of the years "before the coming of love" into the rapturous days when "natura benigna" is the watchword of the world, and through these to dark days of suffering with their sinister vision of "natura maligna," winning at the end a passionless and transcendental peace, seems to offer a typical portrayal of the pilgrim's progress of the inner life. And scattered through it all are such unforgettable verses as "Song leaps from deeps unplumbed by spoken word," and "If heaven's bright halls are very far from sea, and and I dread a pang the angels could not 'suage," "From that dear harp, her heart, whose chords are love," and "Though Love be mocked by Death's obscene derision, Love still is Nature's truth and Death her lie," and, most wonderful of all, the "First Kiss" sonnet, long familiar to all who treasure the purest gold of English poetry, yet which we venture to quote for the sheer pleasure of transcription. "If only in dreams may Man be fully blest, The verse which we have ventured to italicize would not be easy to match, even in the greatest of our poets. The remaining contents of this volume include, besides the miscellaneous section, the poem called "Christmas at the Mermaid," a lyrical rosary whose beads are told by Jonson and Raleigh and Drayton and "W. H.," singing now the praises of the friend who has lately left London for the quiet of Stratford, now the glories of English patriotism as illustrated by the repulse of the Armada, and all the great deeds that were still thrilling in English souls. The miscellaneous pieces are mostly sonnets, and nearly all of them are of an occasional or personal character. They establish beyond cavil the place of their author among the great English sonnetwriters, a place beside Milton and Keats and Wordsworth and Rossetti. It is hard to choose among poems of such beauty and distinction, but perhaps the sonnet-sequence "What the Silent Voices Said," inspired by the funeral of Tennyson, may be taken as the high-water mark of the poet's achievement in this sort of memorial verse. Of the six sonnets thus linked together, we quote the last. "Beyond the sun, beyond the furthest star, Shines still the land which poets still may win Bidding them join their country and their clan." ye Between you still? - keep Love's bright sails afloat, During the past few weeks the name of Mr. Stephen Phillips has become, in certain critical quarters at least, one to conjure with. The loud acclaim which has greeted his recent volume of "Poems," coupled with the notoriety attendant upon his exploitation by a self-constituted English "Academy," have together made his name familiar to a great many readers. The thin volume by which the extravagant claims made for Mr. Phillips by his sponsors must either be justified or fall to the ground is now before us, and the question becomes pertinent whether he has really achieved greatness or merely had it thrust upon him by over-zealous friends. When we remember the sort of thing that even so sane and conservative a critic as R. H. Hutton not so long ago said in "The Spectator" about the then newly-discovered poet of "Wordsworth's Grave," we are at least given pause at sound of the praise that has been heaped upon Mr. Phillips, and made to realize the unwisdom of a stampeded judgment. Some degree of suspicion is justifiable under these circumstances, and it is therefore something of a surprise to find the work of Mr. Phillips on the whole so admirable. It is of very uneven quality, indeed, and such poems as "The Wife" and "The Woman with the Dead Soul," which have been sin gled out for special praise, do not impress us as being quite deserving of it. Mr. William Watson has recently dissented from this critical acclaim, pointing out very justly that a great theme is as important as noble treatment in the making of tragedy. There is, of course, a question-begging element in this criticism, for the human soul may rise to grandeur in the most humble or sordid environment; but at least the poet should not emphasize, as Mr. Phillips seems to do, the prosaic surroundings of the women whose tragedy is portrayed in these two poems. As Mr. Ruskin has said more than once, the dying-out of the soul within a man or a woman is an awful thing, fit for the most tragic contemplation; but the effect may be spoiled by an excess of realism in the treatment. At least the realism should be spiritual rather than material, a truth that Mr. Phillips seems not to have grasped in writing the poem with which his volume opens. Yet, for all this defect, there are wonderful things in the poem, particularly these lines descriptive of the dying soul's last moments of hectic life. "For not at once, not without any strife, Builded like early Paradise again, Now at some flower, or human face, or sky, Or at some waft of fields in midnight sweet, Or soul of summer down in the dark street." There are exquisite things, too, in the "Christ in Hades" phantasy, by which Mr. Phillips first made himself known a year or more ago, and which comes at the close of the present collection. But our highest praise and remaining space must be reserved for "Marpessa," a poem which could hardly have been written had it not been for Tennyson's "Tithonus," which is constantly awakening echoes of the great singers of the past, yet has so distinctive a beauty of its own that we should mourn indeed were it to be lost out of the treasury of our literature. pessa, being given by Zeus her choice between the god Apollo and Idas a mortal, chose Idas "such is the descriptive legend which introduces us to the poem. Here is the plea of Idas for the love of Marpessa, a passage of such perfect beauty as to need no commentary. "I love thee then Not only for thy body packed with sweet Thy freshness stealing on me like strange sleep. And thou art full of whispers and of shadows. "Mar It has been died for, though I know not when, In this dark country of the world! Thou art Even the god cannot match the eloquence of this appeal, and the maiden makes choice of the mortal. The lot of Tithonus seems to her far less desirable than the lot of human lovers who grow old together, in whom passion of youth becomes transmuted into the calm affection of maturity. And though the first sweet sting of love be past, The first and secret kiss by twilight hedge, The poem which contains these passages, and others of almost equal beauty, constitutes a real addition to English song, and makes us exceedingly hopeful of the writer's future. We have given up hoping for great things from Mr. William Watson. He has a considerable talent for serious verse of the higher imitative order, but that talent was displayed almost if not quite as fully in his first volume as in any succeeding one. "The Hope of the World" is the eighth collection of original verse that he has put forth, and is, like its predecessors, a curious mixture of strength with weakness, of intellectual passion with mere rhetorical froth. For one thing, Mr. Watson cannot get rid of the self-consciousness that even here, in his latest volume, prompts him to describe himself as "Singing a nation's woe, in wonder and ire, Against me half the wise and all the great." One of the most unfortunate things about Mr. Watson's verse is that it so often inevitably invites comparison with the greatest achievements of English song, and naturally to its discomfiture. Readers of "Hellas, Hail!" cannot help thinking of the glorious lyrical outburst of another "Hellas," while the poem to "The Unknown God" deliberately challenges comparison with Mr. Kipling's magnificent "Recessional.' Whatever may be the philosophical justification for the intellectual attitude of this invocation, the poverty of its form is evident enough. when we put by the side of the poorest of Mr. Kipling's stanzas such a passage as the following: "Best by remembering God, say some, We keep our high imperial lot. We cannot ignore a contrast thus forced upon our attention, and the pale abstractions of Mr. Watson's verses make but a poor showing by the side of the rich imagery and the religious passion of Mr. Kipling's hymn. In this as in his other volumes Mr. Watson is at his best when he essays some bit of spiritual portraiture, as in these "Jubilee Night" verses: "Long watched I, and at last to the sweet dale Went down, with thoughts of two great women, thoughts As Thine, my Queen, Victoria the Beloved!" The poet of "Homeward Songs by the Way" has endeared himself to the lovers of contemplative verse, and his new volume will meet an appreciative welcome from readers whose souls are attuned to the elusive harmonies of his soft and dreamy measures. In "The Earth Breath, and Other Poems Celtic color and glamour are blent with a strain of oriental mysticism, and the product is exquisitely imaginative and tender. It is indeed a "fountain of shadowy beauty" (to quote one of the happiest titles of the volume) whose springs are at the command of this fine spirit, but the passion is no less deep for being veiled in these subtle mists of delicate imagery. Let us reproduce one of the simpler lyrics. "Image of beauty, when I gaze on thee, How through one door we go to life or death No single joy or sorrow do I know: Elate for freedom leaps the starry power, The life which passes mourns its wasted hour. "And, ah, to think how thin the veil that lies Between the pain of hell and paradise! Where the cool grass my aching head embowers God sings the lovely carol of the flowers." Lovelier than these verses, if such a thing be possible, are the stanzas which dedicate the volume to Mr. W. B. Yeats. "I thought, beloved, to have brought to you "Homeward I go not yet; the darkness grows; "Yet of my night I give to you the stars, The "Poems of a Country Gentleman" are simple and sincere exercises in verse, reflecting the moods |