Bahûnâmêmi pratham, 'I am first Of many sons,' bahunam madhyama But of as many more not first nor last!' Kim swidyamasya Kartivyam yanmay Adya Karishyati, 'what good use Of Yama may I serve, dying to-day?'" Yet in such passages as the following (fragments of which will be recognized as incorporated into Emerson's "Brahma "), there is no lack of dignity: “He who, Alone, Undifferenced, unites 'He is the man and woman, youth and maid; The babe new-born, the withered ancient, propped Upon his staff. He is whatever is,— The black bee, and the tiger, and the fish, The green bird with red eyes, the tree, the grass, The cloud that hath the lightning in its womb, The seasons and the seas. By Him they are, In Him begin and end." 'Only the wise By Adhyatmayoga-severing Their thought from shows, and fixing it on truth, Whose House was never entered, who abides "If he that slayeth thinks I slay'; if he "The untouched Soul Sits in the hollow heart of all that lives. Whoso hath laid aside desire and fear, There is a little too much of Sanskrit and of capital letters here, but on the whole the translation is done in a high spirit. VOL V.-42. We have left ourselves little space to speak of the forty-odd other poems, and perhaps it is as well. They are a medley of translations, ballads, lyrics, narratives, descriptions, pastorals, imitations, epigrams-in fact, Mr. Arnold's versatile talent has evidently led him to roam cursorily over the whole field of poetry, from the epic to the epigrammatic stanza, omitting only the drama. Some of these poems are very pretty; most of them interesting; a few entirely uninteresting, and only cumbering the ground in print. The Hindu ballads might be excellent, but that the liberal sprinkling of such refrains as "Hu-ri-jee," " Wah, Wah," rather burlesque the author's intention. This, for instance, is the close of a spirited ballad: "Sent him back, with dances and drum- One's general impression of the whole collection must be that Mr. Arnold can do so well, it would scarcely be pardonable that he has not done better, but for the knowledge of the untoward circumstances of his occupation. We will not close our review without quoting one stanza to illustrate his best manner in a simple English lyric: Quiet, in the reaches of the river, Rocking the great ships to sea, Rock the sea-poppy and the bee?" But the most satisfactory book of poems that comes before us for notice, the least pretentious of all, is R. L. Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses.1 So delightful is this collection of child thoughts that the best way to review it is to advise every reader who retains any tender memories of his own childhood to go and read it. Whether it would prove as charming to children themselves as to grown people looking back into their childhood, we do not know; it would 1 A Child's Garden of Verses. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by Chilion Beach. SUMMER NOVELS. We do not know whether it is in anticipation of a cholera season in the coming summer vacation, that the publishers have put forth so peculiarly trivial a collection of novels as they have; calculating that the general mind will be so far distraught by anxiety as to have no attention to spare for being critical. Possibly this is a miscalculation; the more distraught the mind, the more excellent will the novel need to be in order to hold it. However this may be, there can be no question of the fact that we have before us a collection of summer novels of unusually light weight-by which it is not to be understood that they are unusually sprightly or readable, for they are only moderately so. A much larger proportion than usual are American; in the winter we do not expect to see many English reprints outside of the regular weekly ten and twenty cent libraries, but when the summer vacation supply of novels begins to appear, paper-covered English stories usually play a large part. Of the dozen novels that we are about to notice, however, only three are of this class. 4 Across the Chasm, Pilot Fortune,2 Roslyn's Fortune, and A Carpet Knight, are so much of a piece that we defy any reader to pick out after a lapse of two weeks their separate characters and plots without real mental effort; quite as much, in fact, as would be necessary if they were four of the conventional English novels. There are minor distinctions between them when one comes to look closely; and they vary a good deal in intelligence and in use of the English language. Roslyn's Fortune is crude and con 1 Across the Chasm. New York; Charles Scribner's Sons, 1885. For sale in San Francisco by A. L. Ban croft & Co. 2 Pilot Fortune. By Marian C. L. Reeves and Emily Read. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by Chilion Beach. 8 Roslyn's Fortune. By Christian Reid. New York: Appleton & Co. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by James T. White. 4A Carpet Knight. By Harford Flemming. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. All tains no social study; the three others are written well, and Across the Chasm contains a few bits of social observation and several points that are really good and genuine, A Carpet Knight a pleasant set of intelligent people, who converse well, and Pilot Fortnne a good background of island and ocean and picturesque grouping of circumstance. four narrate the attempts of several lovers (three, in all but Pilot Fortune) to win an enchanting heroine; the worst one always comes within an inch of success-in one case the wedding dress is made—but at the last moment fortune relents and delivers the prize over to the right man. It is true that in A Carpet Knight the heroine never hesitates from the first in her allegiance to the best of her three lovers, but a sub-heroine is provided, and supplied with two lovers, that she may lean to the worse and finally waver into the hands of the right one. We are pleased to be able to add that the five young women (counting the sub-heroine) all make their final choice with excellent good taste, and to the satisfaction of any reader who is a good judge of lovers. For the benefit of any person who may wish to read one or more of these books, but not all, we will add a few notes on the points in which they differ. Milicent, the beautiful girl of Pilot Fortune, is stranded on a Nova Scotian island, and wooed by a local farmerfisherman and a Boston tourist with a yacht. Julia in A Carpet Knight is a Philadelphian belle, and her lovers are a society and sporting fellow-townsman, a doctor from Boston, and her guardian; her friends are nice people, and the book has plenty of unaffected good breeding; it is, in fact, all one could ask of a purely society novel, and needs to make it better, nothing but-originality and power. Across the Chasm has for heroine a lovely Margaret from a Southern plantation, who visits a married cousin in Washington; she leaves behind her in the South one lover, an amiable young ruined planter, and meets in Washington two, a traveled and accomplished Southern cousin, and a Northern architect. After various complications, she and the Northerner clasp hands across the bloody chasm. As she was already of one mind with the North about negroes, secession, and the honorableness of work, the chasm that remained was not very deep; in fact, it consisted chiefly of a hot difference of opinion as to whether the claims of hospitality compel a man to treat every one well under his own roof, or whether an intruder should be snubbed. A minor point is made of the Southern independence of convention and calm confidence in one's own position, as contrasted with a certain anxiety as to station on the part of the Northerner. More might have been made of this, perhaps. There is an excellent little episode with some very real children, and a good genuine love-passage at the end. Roslyn is also a Southern girl, but framed about with plantations and servants; her lovers are a retired confederate Major who owns a rehabilitated plantation, his penniless scapegrace cousin, and her own step-brother, recently from college. Timias Terrystone1 reverses the situation of the four novels just described. Young Terrystone is an engaging artist, of the oldfashioned, fresh-faced type, which women in men's novels are supposed to love, and is sought by three women, nearly captured by the worst, and finally escapes into the hands of the best. It is a dreadful blunder to tell a tale which consists so entirely of the hero's fascinations and conquests of women, in the first person. There is a rather pretty, old-fashioned air about the story, and a good deal of tediousness. The locality is New York, and the three love-lorn maids are a sentimental hoyden from Philadelphia, a dashing actress in late youth, and a Quaker girl on a Mohawk farm. Before taking up the other four American novels, the only ones in the whole number under notice that have any claim to careful attention, we will glance at the three English 1 Timias Terrystone. By Oliver Rell Bunce. New York: E. Appleton & Co. . 1885. For sale in San Francisco by James T. White. novels, Matt,2 Addie's Husband, The Witch's Head. Matt is by an author of very respectable rank, and shows in all its details that it is written by some one who knows his trade. It is a mere trifle of a story-wreckers on the Welsh coast; a foundling whose parentage is known to one person only, and he the one interested in concealing it; a strolling artist, who wrests the secret from its hiding place, and gets a broken head in the process; an heiress restored to her own; and a wedding. It is told with a careless humor that acquits the author of taking the little tale for anything of any more consequence than it is. Addie's Husband is a Rhoda Broughton imitation, more refined and less strong than its models. It has the bad father; the family of neglected children, fond of each other, rough in speech, and wild in behavior; one of whom develops profound powers of affection, which differentiate her from the shallower remainder of the family, and throw her entirely upon the lover or husband with whom, after much alienation, she usually comes to satisfactory final understanding ;all of which details are common to imitations of Miss Broughton, and show which of her novels is dearest to the novel-writing young woman. The present copy is pruned of all the offensive qualities of the original, and its situation is arranged to allow of some excellent emotional melodrama, but it somehow falls short of touching the emotions. It does not fall grotesquely short, however, and it is not wooden; and perhaps any one who has a taste for emotional novels might do worse than read it. The Witch's Head is quite the worst novel before us. It is crude, it is tedious, it is pointless. It contains the trio of lovers who seem to haunt this season's stories, and indeed duplicates them ingeniously, for the hero is beloved of three maids, and the heroine of three men. The "witch's head" has no pos 2 Matt. A Tale of a Caravan. By Robert Buchanan. New York: E. Appleton & Co. For sale in San Francisco by James T. White. 8 Addie's Husband. New York: E. Appleton & Co. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by James T. White. By H. Rider Haggard. New For sale in San Francisco 4 The Witch's Head. York: E. Appleton & Co. by James T. White. T sible connection with the story, and is dragged in in the vain effort to give it strength. The fascinating and triply-beloved hero is again of the fresh, boyish type, indicating a masculine authorship, though the indication is contradicted by one or two tirades against the present status of women. There come next under notice two novels, both American, A Knight of the Black Forest1 and Trajan.2 The first of these has already been published as a magazine serial. It has not, perhaps, as much feeling nor as much of a story as many inferior ones; but it has that quality, difficult to describe, that insures admission to the pages of the critical magazines, and sets it apart from such books as those we have been noticing. It has a carefully wrought out situation and characters of its own; it abounds in a light picturesqueness; in short, it would be fair to say it has the technique of story-writing well in hand. Its author had previously put forth one novelette that was noticeably good for a first one. We hardly suppose that any one will really care much for this little study of German and American flirtation; but it shows a commendable regard for method, is in the manner of the time, and is properly to be counted a success for the writer, and a step to an assured position of profitable authorship. So mighty is the mastering of one's handicraft in a workmanlike way! In novelwriting, one is really out of the lists until he has done this; and yet the popular impression is that novel-writing "comes by nature." "Trajan" is the most ambitious story of the summer. Its publishers have done it one good turn by launching it with such trumpeting that the critic is necessarily prejudiced against it, and suffers a reaction of friendliness upon discovering that it is really much better than he would have expected from the transparently commercial eulogies that accompanied it. This is a subtlety in advertising tactics worth the consideration of publishers. Laying aside all prepossessions or reactions, however, it may be said that "Trajan" is an 1 A Knight of the Black Forest. By Grace Denio Litchfield. New York: Putnam's Sons. interesting novel, showing much serious work, many excellent possibilities, and a decided falling short of its own intentions. It has a flavor of Julian Hawthorne, much in the same way that that ingenious writer himself perpetually has a decided flavor of greater ones. The author undoubtedly has ability; but he has undertaken more than he could manage in "Trajan." "The MoneyMakers," published anonymously, is accepted as his; and the same hand seems pretty evident in the two: the mixture of ability and inefficiency, the womanish qualities, the very language. In "The Money-Makers" there was at the best a good deal more strength, and there was throughout a better style (save for the French-phrase vice): as this book was doubtless later written, there is an encouragement herein; and that its weak points are weaker than anything in "Trajan is doubtless due to more hasty writing. But there are weak points enough in "Trajan." It is melodramatic, yet a little tedious. The writer stops to "moralize" a little here and there, and a little is too much, because the moralizing is not profound and does not justify itself. It would better have been all cut out, with the exception of about a dozen sentences. The conversation, too, when it tries to be playful, is rather heavy humor; and when it tries to be witty, is rather pointless repartee. The love-making is for the most part weak. The canvas is unnecessarily crowded with figures, and some unnecessary incident comes in. The melodramatic character of the main narrative, which winds its way through all these obstructions, is sufficient to redeem the book on the whole from heaviness, and would have made it, properly pruned, powerful— powerful in a way hardly to be approved by a stern critic, for, as we have said, it is melodrama: yet we are not prepared to condemn any work of art, story or music or acting, that really stirs human emotion, because the emotion is stirred by exaggerations and broad pathos that are not in the best taste. No one is a greater sinner in this respect than Dickens; and the reading world has always. pardoned him. The reason that even if |