Bellum Magazines of South Caroliua, by Sidney J. Cohen (University Press, Columbia, S. C.). The Universal Text-Book of Religion, Part III, Vol. I. "Hinduism." Edited by Annie Besant (Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Madras, India). Methods and Aims in the Study of Literature. A Series of Extracts and Illustrations, arranged and adapted by Lane Cooper (Ginn & Co.). Thomas Middleton, edited by Martin W. Sampson (American Book Co.). Questions on Readings in English Literature. A Student's Manual, by Maurice Garland Fulton, Raymond George Bressler, and Glenn Hawthorne Mullin (Century Co.). Studies in Philology, Vol. XII, No. 4, October, 1915, "The Latin Prefix 'Pro' in French," by William Morton Dey (University Press, Chapel Hill, N. C.). Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance, by Sir Sidney Lee: The Annual Shakespeare Lecture before the British Academy, 1915 (Oxford University Press). Immensee, von Theodor Storm, edited by Louis H. Dirks (American Book Company); Home to Him's Muvver, by Margaret Prescott Montague (E. P. Dutton & Co.), reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly.

Oxford Pamphlets, through the courtesy of Sir Gilbert Parker: Armenian Atrocities. The Murder of a Nation, by Arnold J. Toynbee; with a speech delivered by Lord Bryce in the House of Lords (Hodder & Stoughton); How Do We Stand To-day? Speech of the Rt. Hon. H. Asquith in the House of Commons, Nov. 2, 1915 (T. Fisher Unwin); The Freedom of the Seas, by the Hon. Bernard R. Wise; Cotton and Contraband, by Viscount Milner; What Is the Matter With England? A Criticism and a Reply, by Sir Gilbert Parker (Darling & Son); Correspondence with the United States Ambassador Respecting the Execution of Miss Cavell at Brussels. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty October, 1915 (T. Fisher Unwin); The Second Belgian Grey Book. Part I and Part II, section 10 (T. Fisher Unwin).

EMERSON AND MAETERLINCK

Maeterlinck's admiration for Emerson has been frequently remarked upon. The dealers in literary intimacies have told of the well-worn and abudantly underscored edition of Emerson's essays in the private library of the Belgian author, and every reader who has sought a complete acquaintance with Maeterlinck's writings is familiar with the enthusiastic introduction which he contributed to a French translation of seven of Emersons essays, published some twenty years ago. But, in general, it has seemed sufficient to the biographers, panegyrists, interpreters, and critics of Maeterlinck merely to list Emerson vaguely among the sages—the philosophers, mystics, transcendentalists, and prophets-to whom the elegant Flemish visionary and idealist is in some measure beholden for his ideas or with whom he would appear to have some sort of intellectual or temperamental affiliation. It is easy to be glib with names, and the numerous literary advertisers of Maeterlinck, especially in America, have exercised no reticence in their rather thinly erudite allusions to Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry, Marcus Aurelius, Ruysbroeck the Admirable, Boehme, Swedenborg, Novalis, and divers others, including Coleridge, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Emerson. Whatever correspondence it may be possible to disclose between Maeterlinck and these various eminent sources of spiritual insight, it is certain that between him and Emerson in particular there are noteworthy similarities and equally significant differBoth the resemblances and the unlikenesses are probably obvious enough to anyone who finds the time to regard the two men deliberately side by side, but it is perhaps not imper

ences.

tinent to take special cognizance of them, with a view to venturing an opinion as to the relative longevity that the work of each of these purveyors of wisdom seems likely to enjoy.

It is, of course, broadly, the mystic in Emerson that Maeterlinck admires. "I believe, he says, with his characteristically jewelled rhetoric, "that the writings of the mystics are the purest diamonds of the wondrous treasure of humanity." But among these "purest diamonds" there are important varieties of color, form, size, number of facets, and appropriateness of setting. "Plato and Plotinus," he reminds one, "are above all, princes of dialectic. They reach mysticism through the science of reasoning. They make use of their discursive soul, and seem to mistrust their intuitive or contemplative soul." In the mediæval Ruysbroeck, on the contrary, that ecstatic saint, “we meet again the habits of Asiatic thought; the intuitive soul reigns supreme above the discursive purification of ideas by words." Emerson is neither a prince of dialectic nor an inspired monk wrapped into union with God. He is "the good morning shepherd of pale meadows, green with a new optimism, both natural and plausible. He does not lead us to the edge of a precipice. He does not make us go from the humble and familiar close, because the glacier, the sea, the eternal snows, the palace, the stable, the cheerless hearth of the poor, and the cot of the sickall are found beneath the same heaven, purified by the same stars, and subjugated to the same infinite powers.'

Maeterlinck was still a young man, with swift and uncertain poetic images whirling in his mind, when he thus praised the American seer. But his meaning is not obscure. It is emphasized by what he chants descriptively of three other masters of luminous insight. "Goethe accompanies our soul upon the shores of the sea of Serenity. Marcus Aurelius places our soul on the hill-side of an ideal humanity, its perfect excellence somewhat tiresome, and beneath too heavy a foliage of hopeless resignation. Carlyle, the spiritual brother of Emerson, who in this century has given us warning from the other end of the valley, has brought before us in lightning strokes, upon a background of shadow and storm, of an unknown, relentlessly strange, the only heroic moments of our being." Emerson has the strong calm of