lation which our government customarily assumes in the affairs of the world. 'Men of broad and progressive opinions believe that a republic of fifty millions of people should make its ideas and influence felt all round the globe, for the good of other nations as well as for the extension of its own commercial relations. On this question, the Democrats, who are conservative as to public expenditures, opposed to giving the national government any real military or naval power, and very much disposed to narrow their vision down to petty matters lying close at home, would naturally take the negative side.

Why not add, or rather put in the first place, the new civil rights issue which Colonel Ingersoll and Frederick Douglass have recently tried to raise in Washington, in opposition to the Supreme Court decision which declared Charles Sumner's civil rights law to be unconstitutional? This question may well be asked by old Republicans. The answer is that the public mind is no longer interested in the affairs of the

negro race. A generation of controversy and four years of terrible war gave the negro in America freedom and the ballot. Now the common sentiment is that enough has been done for him, and that he should make his own way upward in the social scale. There is no demand for a constitutional amendment which will put the machinery of federal courts at work to secure him good seats at the theatres, good beds in hotels and sleeping-cars, and the right to be shaved in the fashionable barber-shops. People are content, now that the tension of sympathy with the enfranchised race has relaxed, to leave such matters to state legislation.

Other questions might be added, but here are enough for an active intellectual canvass. Such a canvass would have an excellent effect on the public mind. Instead of getting angry anew over bygone quarrels and threshing the old straw of dead controversies, the voters would be led to the frank discussion of living issues which affect the whole body of the American people. E. V. Smalley.

Edmund W. Gosse.

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MR. STEDMAN, in the graceful and exhaustive comment with which he has prefaced this fine edition of Poe's most popular masterpiece,' mentions Doré's obvious defects, and lays stress on his equally obvious originality and power, as shown in several works, to which he accords the highest praise; but while he asserts a likeness between the genius of Poe and that of Doré, he seems to feel himself on insecure ground in commending this particular interpretation of the one by the other. In fact, here are two imaginative creations, one poetic, one artistic; both are effective, but in our judgment they are incongruous. The common element which Mr. Stedman finds in the working moods of the two men is practically confined to their tendency toward romantic and fantastic themes; in method they are very dissimilar. Poe weaves his spell slowly and subtly, with exceeding watchfulness against detection, and prepares, by scarcely noticed increments of feeling and trifles light as air, for his dénoûment; in Dore's work, so to speak, there is nothing but dénoûment. The latter drops the mask at once, and conquers, if at all, by force; Poe ambushes, like Ariel, in the invisible air, and captivates us, wins, if at all, by charm.

Mr. Stedman apparently means to mark a difference between the poem and the illustrations by stating that Doré "proffers a series of variations upon the theme as he conceived it, the enigma of death and the hallucination of an inconsolable soul."" It does not require much knowledge of Poe's individuality or much literary insight to perceive that death was, in this composition, merely the background that threw his own despair into strong relief, and hallucination

1 The Raven. By EDGAR ALLAN POE. Illustrated by GUSTAVE DORÉ. With Comment by

only the transitory shadow of what he called "the Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance" of reality. Doré parts company with Poe in a way against which the latter protested in his analysis of this poem, by pushing the suggested meaning to an excess, and making the under the upper current of the theme. In the stanzas the lover is not an abnormal being; he is neither sick in body nor unhinged in mind. He has drifted from his book to his dream, from the nepenthe to the bitter-sweet of his sor row; he is suddenly aroused to the substantial world about him, and, being sensitive to the superstitious promptings of flickering firelight, rustling curtains, the impenetrable darkness on which his door opens, the wind without and the calm within, being, moreover, accustomed to yield to the pleasure of such fantasyengendering sensations, he is wrought into a half-nonchalant, half-expectant mood, which does not become serious until, by gradual but conscious surrender to the fascination of the Raven's eyes and croaking refrain, he falls under the myth-making faculty of his own mind, which brings its credence with itself. This, at least, was Poe's apprehension of what he himself created.

On turning to these illustrations, one finds the unity of the original, its progressive and golden-linked art, the humor of the fantastic touch, the naturalness of it, all gone. The lover is dazed from the first; he seems without selfcontrol. The only change of his figure is from rigidity to spasm; the only variation of his dream is from one spectral horror to another. To mark but a few of the essential differences between Poe's and Doré's conception, the lover, instead of being absorbed in his own sorrow, EDMUND C. STEDMAN. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1884.

grieves for his mistress' fate; instead of being fascinated by the Raven's eyes, that "burned into my bosom's core," he is lost in mental abstraction; instead of typifying by his hopeless woe a fact potentially of universal experience, he impersonates the victim of an exceptional and malign fate. We may be sure that the imagination of Poe never saw that rare and radiant maiden clasped in skeleton arms upon the nightly shore whence flew the ominous bird; she wandered happy in that Aidenn far from the regions where he must dwell; sure, too, that it was not the scythe-armed death, throned on the round earth, that rose before him when he dreamt the "dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before," that is a very old and ordinary apparition; sure that he did not see merely gravestones, funeral wreaths, and stiff corpses beneath that gloating lamplight, and that the face of only one woman floated in his vision. But what, we wonder, would he himself, so sensitive to the fortunes of his work, have said to the cut in which the hero questions the Raven with the pose of a rope-dancer; or to the last of the series, the most materialistic of all, in which the lover's soul, lying in the shadow of "Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance," is represented as a body stretched on the floor, in the deep oblivion to adopt the most charitable hypothesis of a paralytic shock? Such designing is a degradation of his finely elaborated art.

These divergences (and many others could be pointed out) make Dore's work, though indebted to Poe's for its accessories and incidents, a separate creation, to be judged of by itself. It depicts, we are told, "the enigma of death and the hallucination of an inconsolable soul." The Sphinx rightly appears in it; for the associations of that symbol displace those of the head of Pallas throughout. The apparitions, too, are such as might haunt an insane mind;

for, to any other, superstition becoming so palpable would become absurd. The figure which stalks, or stiffens, or writhes, through the varying scenes is the melodramatic Poe as he has been too often conceived, a man of shattered nerves, haunted by phantasms of fear, half crazed; the Poe of Baudelaire's ravings, of Curwen's fablings, — the hero of a thousand songs, sonnets, and elegies. Such a preconception of Poe, such romancing about his sorrows, probably underlie the misrepresentation of which the illustrations are guilty. It will be strange, indeed, if the Poe myth, which substitutes a fallen angel for a poet, just as Doré substitutes delirium for imaginative sorrow, should after all survive as popular history through such books as this. In opposition, however, to the impression of Poe given by the cuts stands Mr. Stedman's remarkably just criticism and estimate of this particular poem among Poe's other verse. As he says, it is not the poet's best in imagination, in passion, or in the lift of its melodies; it is nevertheless his greatest because of the wide reach of its power. The comment makes a complete monograph of its subject. Similarly, over against Doré's frenzied drawings stands the admirable design of the title-page, by Vedder, marked by that self-restraint, that solemn suggestiveness, that calm beauty of the nobler symbolism, in which, rather than in simple supernaturalism, Poe delighted. By such examples of the critical spirit in which Poe is to be approached, and of the artistic spirit in which he is to be interpreted, the reader may well profit. It is hardly necessary to add that as a publishers' work this volume has rarely been equaled in this country.

The Princess invites illustration by the wide scope it offers the artist in its diversified landscape, its romantic incidents and dramatic situations. He does not need to stray from his subject, to indulge in "variations of the theme," as

the metamorphosis of a poem into a picture-book is now called; if his fancy and invention only keep pace with the poet's, his powers will be fully employed and his success assured. In this illustrated edition of the poem of which the reputation as a masterpiece has been steadily rising for a generation, the designers have fortunately been content to follow the lead of Tennyson. They have not presumed that their eyes are truersighted, or their imaginations more masterly in the creative craft, than his who set the text for their marginal comment. They have simply endeavored to make more vivid and definite the castle, the wood, and the river; the girlish dismay of the fluttered neophytes, gowned in lilac and daffodilly; the mien and command of the princess; and all the beauty, the richness, the charming attitudes, of which the melodious and lucid description almost excuses the illustrator from his task. Only in the subordinate parts, the head and tail pieces, and the scrolls of the songs, has any original invention been shown; and even here good taste has not been at all trespassed upon, as is evinced by the self-restraint which limited pictorial interpretation of the perfect lyric, "Tears, idle tears," to the figure of a woman striking the harp. These numerous ornamental designs, however, are not the whole secret of the peculiar decorative effect which the series as a whole makes on the eye: the architecture, the gardens, the exquisiteness of the minor furnishings, by which the poet half laughingly marked the ineradicable instincts of woman for all adornments, help to lend a sort of arabesque character to the whole, and frame in, as it were, the beautiful faces which look out, page after page. This atmosphere of simple loveliness which enfolds the poem in its summer haze, the perfection of art which make the medley an

1 The Princess. A Medley. By ALFRED TENXYSON. Illustrated. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1884.

unflawed thing of beauty, seems to have been thoroughly appreciated by those who had this volume in charge, and to have been transfused into the general character of the cuts, which, in spite of considerable individual differences in drawing and execution, maintain a very high standard of excellence. The figure-pieces are frequently unusually good, and show a great gain over those of last year in The Lady of the Lake, to which this is a companion volume. The engraving, too, is, as a rule, careful, completed work, markedly smooth, effective, and technically finished. It is a pity that the binding should have a cheap look, and be stamped with so inferior a design.

Two editions of Gray's Elegy afford new views of the long familiar but always fresh English landscape, with bits of characteristic English accessories from the old settle by the fire to the arches of the great abbey. In Harry Fenn's edition the sketches are said to be made from the actual scene of the poem, the country churchyard of Stoke Pogis and its neighboring uplands and hills. This fact may not in itself add much to the value of cuts except in the truthfulness and vivacity of some of the nature pieces. Possibly, it indirectly led the artist to a certain boldness, a too strictly literal rendering, in other portions of his work: for example, the famous gems that the caves of ocean bear lose their lustre if presented in oyster shells, amid the scientific wonders of submarine scenery; to meet the sun upon the upland lawn does not imply walking into that luminary; and surely the incident of the village Hampden's resisting the little tyrant of his fields did not take place in boyhood, as it is here represented. Such defects of conception limit the value of the designs; the peculiar way in which the verses of the poem are broken up by the irregular shape of the cuts may also

2 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. By THOMAS GRAY. Illustrated by HARRY FENN. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1884.

seem a blemish, and the gravestone cover is positively in bad taste; but there are several very pretty sketches and some fine engraving in this gift-book, which will certainly give pleasure. In the other, which is called the Artists' Edition, the same injury to the beauty of the page by cuts shaped like a stairway, and to the integrity of the poem by splitting up the lines irregularly, is noticeable, but in a much less degree. The illustrations are larger, and the whole volume is much more ambitious. There can, however, be but little variation in the essential conceptions of so plain and narrowly defined a subject. The quiet inclosure of the dead set in continual antithesis to the broad expanse of what by contrast seems a more vital nature, the remembrance of the busy labors and the home comforts which made up the short and simple annals of their lives, and the scanty outlined history of an unknown youth who lies there must suggest to all minds nearly the same visual images, however ingeniously the details be treated. Thus in this, as in the edition already noticed, one opens at random, and finds the abbey arch, the noontide under the trees, the yews and elms, and all the common symbolism of spade, scythe, rank grass, and the like. The designs have a breadth and softness quite in harmony with the general tenor of the stanzas, and the engraving is, in most cases, up to the average of American work, but seldom of the best.

Jean Ingelow's ballad, The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, has long been such a favorite with our people that it would be difficult to suggest a modern poem with a better right to the sort of illustration which, by an admirable custom, is given to brief popular pieces. Partly because it is a ballad of

1 An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. BY THOMAS GRAY. The Artists' Edition. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1883.

2 The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire,

old Boston, but chiefly because it is so tender, musical, and pitiful, this poem deserves to be held in credit, and its memory to be revived, and its value enhanced, if that be possible, by illustration. In the edition under review 2 the landscape is given, the town with its shipping and tower, the old sea wall with its flights of mews, the broad and reedy Lindis, the beacon flaming over the waste; the principal incidents are pictured, the mayor climbing the belfry, the old mother spinning, Elizabeth trolling her milking song, the sweep of the mighty Eygre, the watch on the roof, and the death disclosed at the door in the morning ebb. In all this there was opportunity for effective and beautiful cuts, as indeed many of these designs would be were they not so often veiled with that unintelligible mistiness which still injures some of the modern engraving, or else allowed to melt away into an obscurity that seems meant merely to conceal the drawing. Notwithstanding these blemishes, for such they must be regarded, the book is to be commended for no inconsiderable portion of its illustrations, which help the text quite perceptibly in vigor and picturesqueness.

Although Mr. Scott has touched a nearly threadbare theme, and has failed to accomplish the miracle of throwing new light upon it, his illustrated account of the Renaissance of art in Italy is not without a certain raison d'être. This lies in the singularly clear and admirable method which he has adopted in arranging his material. The work is divided into four books: the first treating of the rise of Italian art; the second, third, and fourth, of its progress, culmination, and decline. Mr. Scott gives a concise and untechnical history of the architecture, sculpture, and painting of

1571. By JEAN INGELOW. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1883.

3 The Renaissance of Art in Italy. An Illustrated History. By LEADER SCOTT. New York: Scribner & Welford. 1883.