said worse things, and-and-and better!" How he liked to sport with names. A stupid clerk named Wawd, he hit off in this couplet:

"What Wawd knows, God knows;

But God knows what Wawd knows." And in a charade on Dodwell:

"My first is that which infants call their Maker,

My second is that which is best let alone."

Pub., G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. And after all this, William C. Hazlitt contributes to the February Atlantic "Eliana: The Latest Windfall," announcing that he had accumulated fifty unpublished epistles of Lamb's in an article of nearly a dozen pages of unfamiliar material!

Three new books I've been looking over carefully make Pope's couplet come to mind:

'Tis with our judgments as our watches

none

Go just alike, yet each believes his own."

And each original thinker becomes leader, attracting a faithful following.

a

Miss Lilian Whiting is a poet yet a practical optimist; a spiritual and a spiritualistic woman, one who lives according to what she urges upon others with the firmest sort of faith in a World Beautiful for all who know how to live rightly. The immense sale of her volumes on this theme shows what a wide influence for good she has been able to exert.

In her last little book on the same theme, "The Joy That No Man Taketh From You," she argues that we all may so live as to gain a lasting joy "so that neither death nor privation nor loss nor disappointment nor trial in any of its innumerable forms shall dim this radiance or diminish this energy." And she asks, "May we not stand in this radiant atmosphere always and unvaryingly, entirely irrespective of any form of trial or sorrow?"

I am free to confess that I cannot attain such constant composure but this is no proof that it cannot be attained.

Here is a sentence which I am sure will help one to gain this noble poise. "The one supreme achievement of the great Journey of human life is that of the consecrated will." Her publishers are Little, Brown and Company, Boston.

I feel like the old farmer who was asked

if his dying wife was resigned. He replied, "Resigned? why she's got to be!"

It was Guy de Maupassant who compared our brief existence here to that of flies in a corked bottle. They fly about trying to escape the inevitable; some get higher than others, but soon all succumb and expire. I've been re-reading Gail Hamilton's Letters; she was apt to express tersely what many others would like to say and she rebelled at this life if this is all; a cruel tragedy. She says, "What I want is a real old-fashioned God who looks after you and follows you up and knows all about you. There is no sort of comfort in thinking of yourself just only a protoplasm floating vaguely around the Universe."

Edward Howard Griggs, the eloquent exponent and setter forth of Dante, Shakespeare, Browning, has thought much on the enigmas of life and in his recently published "Book of Meditations" he writes wisely, at times in the strain Miss Whiting dwells on, as "Why can we not realize constantly that to-day is the opportunity for sublime living? Consecrate some fragment of time every day to the quiet effort to see things in relation: do not depend upon the mere accident of distance to give truth. How different 'modern thought' will look five hundred years from now! But keep open to truth in the certainty that there is a deep below our last sounding, and a height from which our petty hill of vision will be lost in the level plain." But he adds, "If there is no eternity of the subject for whom change exists, as well as of the process of change, it seems to me to be hopeless to attempt any understanding of the farce of life: unless there is this eternity, there can be no rational basis of morals, no motive for living."

I cannot agree to that. I am glad to have lived, and if this be all I still desire to do my best.

By the way, here is his definition of genius: "To affirm always, the best and renounce the lower, that is genius." Satisfactory?

Publisher, B. W. Huebsch, New York.

The "Kasidah" by Sir Richard F. Burton is a most depressing, unforgetable poem; a grand effort from an undoubted genius, but O, so hopeless, so helpless!

"So hard, blunt, crude and purposely inelegant are these couplets, that under the spell and bewilderment of their powerful influence, the Rubaiyat seems, in comparison, almost sophomoric, In Memoriam

that has real live men and women and an engrossing plot give me Ellen Glasgow's "The Wheel of Life"; Arnold Kemper, an athletic, fascinating, selfish, love-compelling man with splendid virtues to balance his grave faults, is a character creation that is strong clear through.

Doubleday, Page and Company.

Books of Places:

Picturesque Sicily, by William A Paton. Harpers.

Brittany, pictures by Mortimer Menpes; text by Dorothy Menpes. A. and C. Black, London.

London Films. Howells. Harpers. More Queer Things About Japan. Selden and Lorrimer.

Two in Italy. Maud Howe. Illustrations by her artist husband, John Elliot. Little, Brown and Company. A Levantine Log Book. Jerome Hart of the Argonaut. Longmans, Green and Company, New York, London, Bombay. (This is super-excellent!) Biography:

With Walt Whitman in Camden, by Horace Traubel. Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.

A Life of Whitman, by Henry Bryan Binns. E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.

Sidney Lanier, by Edwin Mims. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. (The first complete and adequate life of this poet.)

Lincoln: Master of Men, by Alonzo Rothschild. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. (If anything new can be said or told of that great man, one more life will be welcome.)

said worse things, and-and-and better!" How he liked to sport with names. A stupid clerk named Wawd, he hit off in this couplet:

"What Wawd knows, God knows;

But God knows what Wawd knows." And in a charade on Dodwell:

"My first is that which infants call their Maker,

My second is that which is best let alone."

Pub., G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. And after all this, William C. Hazlitt contributes to the February Atlantic "Eliana: The Latest Windfall," announcing that he had accumulated fifty unpublished epistles of Lamb's in an article of nearly a dozen pages of unfamiliar material!

*

* *

Three new books I've been looking over carefully make Pope's couplet come to mind:

'Tis with our judgments as our watches

none

Go just alike, yet each believes his own."

And each original thinker becomes a leader, attracting a faithful following.

Miss Lilian Whiting is a poet yet a practical optimist; a spiritual and a spiritualistic woman, one who lives according to what she urges upon others with the firmest sort of faith in a World Beautiful for all who know how to live rightly. The immense sale of her volumes on this theme shows what a wide influence for good she has been able to exert.

In her last little book on the same theme, "The Joy That No Man Taketh From You," she argues that we all may so live as to gain a lasting joy "so that neither death nor privation nor loss nor disappointment nor trial in any of its innumerable forms shall dim this radiance or diminish this energy." And she asks, "May we not stand in this radiant atmosphere always and unvaryingly, entirely irrespective of any form of trial or sorrow?"

I am free to confess that I cannot attain such constant composure but this is no proof that it cannot be attained.

Here is a sentence which I am sure will help one to gain this noble poise. "The one supreme achievement of the great Journey of human life is that of the consecrated will." Her publishers are Little, Brown and Company, Boston.

I feel like the old farmer who was asked

if his dying wife was resigned. He replied, "Resigned? why she's got to be!"

It was Guy de Maupassant who compared our brief existence here to that of flies in a corked bottle. They fly about trying to escape the inevitable; some get higher than others, but soon all succumb and expire. I've been re-reading Gail Hamilton's Letters; she was apt to express tersely what many others would like to say and she rebelled at this life if this is all; a cruel tragedy. She says, "What I want is a real old-fashioned God who looks after you and follows you up and knows all about you. There is no sort of comfort in thinking of yourself just only a protoplasm floating vaguely around the Universe."

Edward Howard Griggs, the eloquent exponent and setter forth of Dante, Shakespeare, Browning, has thought much on the enigmas of life and in his recently published "Book of Meditations" he writes wisely, at times in the strain Miss Whiting dwells on, as "Why can we not realize constantly that to-day is the opportunity for sublime living? Consecrate some fragment of time every day to the quiet effort to see things in relation: do not depend upon the mere accident of distance to give truth. How different 'modern thought' will look five hundred years from now! But keep open to truth in the certainty that there is a deep below last sounding, and a height from which our petty hill of vision will be lost in the level plain." But he adds, "If there is no eternity of the subject for whom change exists, as well as of the process of change, it seems to me to be hopeless to attempt any understanding of the farce of life: unless there is this eternity, there can be no rational basis of morals, no motive for living."

Our

I cannot agree to that. I am glad to have lived, and if this be all I still desire to do my best.

By the way, here is his definition of genius: "To affirm always, the best and renounce the lower, that is genius." Satisfactory?

Publisher, B. W. Huebsch, New York.

The "Kasidah" by Sir Richard F. Burton is a most depressing, unforgetable poem; a grand effort from an undoubted genius, but O, so hopeless, so helpless!

"So hard, blunt, crude and purposely inelegant are these couplets, that under the spell and bewilderment of their powerful influence, the Rubaiyat seems, in comparison, almost sophomoric, In Memoriam

that has real live men and women and an engrossing plot give me Ellen Glasgow's "The Wheel of Life"; Arnold Kemper, an athletic, fascinating, selfish, love-compelling man with splendid virtues to balance his grave faults, is a character creation that is strong clear through.

Doubleday, Page and Company.

Books of Places:

Picturesque Sicily, by William A Paton. Harpers.

Brittany, pictures by Mortimer Menpes; text by Dorothy Menpes. A. and C. Black, London.

London Films. Howells. Harpers.

More Queer Things About Japan. Selden and Lorrimer.

Illustra

Two in Italy. Maud Howe. tions by her artist husband, John Elliot. Little, Brown and Company. A Levantine Log Book. Jerome Hart of the Argonaut. Longmans, Green and Company, New York, London, Bombay. (This is super-excellent!) Biography:

With Walt Whitman in Camden, by Horace Traubel. Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.

A Life of Whitman, by Henry Bryan Binns. E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.

Sidney Lanier, by Edwin Mims. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. (The first complete and adequate life of this poet.)

Lincoln: Master of Men, by Alonzo Rothschild. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. (If anything new can be said or told of that great man, one more life will be welcome.)

Poems:

Songs of America, by Edna Dean Proctor. Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

New York City has a Funeral Drivers' Union, and hereafter people can die and be decently buried there under its dictation. Those who favored the "open shop" while alive will be boycotted after death, a "future punishment" not dreamed of by John Calvin nor Jonathan Edwards. A "trust" already controls the price of coffins, so that they cost twice what they ought to, and the undertakers add in making death a luxury too expensive for common people. Shakespeare did not know about these things when he wrote whether it is better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. If he had known he might have taken second thought before hazarding the probabilities. least he might have advised less haste in "shuffling off this mortal coil." The ostentation of modern funerals is farcical anyway, and if "the Unions" can make them unpopular they may plead that excuse for existence.

At

a chill, and it is very modern to treat tuberculous cases with open air in cold weather. And now New York City experts have discovered that cases of pneumonia are best treated with fresh air regardless of temperature. They have discovered that a patient with a high fever and dry skin cannot take cold. The latest treatment is to keep the room open to the outer air, and keep only the feet of the patient warm. Water is given frequently and freely and easily digested food is given. This reverses the "regular" treatment, but its first advocate claims success for twenty-five years, and a year's trial at the Presbyterian hospital has been remarkably successful. One point is certainly in its favor, it don't need a highpriced physician to write a Latin prescription as a pass on which the patient can start on the road to health.

That all sin is disease has long been a general proposition of a popular class of advanced thinkers, but particulars have been lacking until now, when the editor of the Canadian Journal of Medicine and Surgery announces that all "bad temper" is all due to indigestion, gout and uric acid, and prescribes abstinence from meat, wine, beer and spirits, and tea and coffee, and muscular exercise on an empty stomach. Too many patients would have the empty stomach all right, ready for the exercise, but whether the immediate effect of the treatment would produce an improved temper is doubtful. To those who most need the treatment such a prescription would increase the malady; they would think bad things instead of pleasant ones, and concentrated soothing syrup would be in order, and "beef, wine and iron" would be "indicated" to the most casual observer.

*

Some of us can remember when the treatment of typhoid patients involved the exclusion of fresh air or any approach to

Dr. Richard Hodgson's spirit failed to talk sensibly on its first attempt to "communicate" after it had entered the other world. He tried again with an explanation of the difficulty of the transmission of ideas from the spiritual plane. He said: "All expression would be quite impossible without some medium, and until some developments in conscious evolution in the course of the things which pertain to the development which is spiritual determine the exact ratio in spiritual comprehension upon the part of the medium and the understanding of the same by the spirit attempting to communicate, until then incontrovertible facts of spirit return, and especially of identity, will continue difficult to obtain." After reading that sentence half a dozen times there is still a doubt as to its meaning. It would seem, however, that so far as the Doctor has progressed over there he has only found out that "it can't be did," a conclusion which is quite prevalent on this side the line. If belief in life beyond the grave rested on what the Doctor's friends have been able to send back from there, "we are of all men the most miserable."