But Sigmund laughed and answered-and he spake a scornful word "And if I take twice that treasure-will it buy me Odin's sword ?"

From the extracts which we may make the reader will probably infer that the measure which Morris has here chosen is capable of great variety and melody.

The poem opens with a description of King Völsung's dwelling and the wedding of his daughter Signy-we repeat that Morris covers the whole ground divided between the medieval "Lay" and Wagner's tetralogy. We quote half a dozen of the initial couplets in order to illustrate the rhythm and music of the verse, and we might also point out the characteristic touch in the last lines :

There was a dwelling of kings ere the world was waxen old;

Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;

Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors; Earls' wives were the weaving women, queens' daughters strewed

its floors,

And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.
There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great
Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate;
There the gods were unforgotten, yea whiles they walked with men
Though e'en in that world's beginning rose a murmur now and
again

Of the midward time and the fading and the last of the latter days,
And the entering in of the terror and the death of the People's
Praise.

That the reader may judge how carefully the text of

the old myth is reproduced, we set beside the words ascribed to Signy in the crisis of what may be called the first catastrophe, the corresponding passage of the "Völsunga Saga."

And she said, "My youth was happy, but this hour belike is best
Of all the days of my life-tide that soon shall have an end,

I have come to greet thee, Sigmund, then back again must I wend,
For his bed the Goth-king dighteth; I have lain therein, time was,
And loathed the sleep I won there but lo, how all things pass,
And hearts are changed and softened, for lovely now it seems.
Yet fear not my forgetting; I shall see thee in my dreams

A mighty king of the world 'neath the boughs of the Branstock

green,

With thine earls and thy lords about thee, as the Völsung fashion

hath been;

And then shall all ye remember how I loved the Völsung name, Nor spared, to spend for its blooming, my joy and my life and my

fame.

For hear thou, that Sinfiotli, who hath wrought out our desire, Who hath compassed about King Siggeir with his sea of a deadly

fire,

Who brake thy grave asunder-my child and thine he is,

Begot in that house of the Dwarf-kind for no other end than this.
The son of Völsung's daughter, the son of Völsung's son,
Look, look! Might another helper this deed with thee have done?

The Icelandic prose paraphrase runs as follows:

But she answered, "Take heed now and consider if I have kept King Siggeir in memory and his slaying of Völsung the king. I let slay both my children whom I deemed worthless for the revenging of our father, and I went into the wood to thee in a witchwife's shape; and now behold Sinfiotli is the son of thee and of me

both and therefore has he this so great hardihood and fierceness in that he is the son both of Völsung's and Völsung's daughter; and for this and for naught else have I so wrought that King Siggeir might get his bane at last; and all these things have I done that vengeance might fall on him, and that I too might not live long, and merrily now will I die with King Siggeir though I was naught merry to wed him.

We would gladly quote at greater length (although an epic poem cannot of course be judged from citations), and especially should we like to reproduce the forging of the sword, Fafnir's bane, the slaying of Fafnir, the awakening of Brynhild, and all those scenes and incidents which are handled in Wagner's dramas. It would be interesting, too, to trace in the fourth book of the English poem a parallel with the latter and stronger half of the Nibelungen Lied. That, however, would carry us too far, and the reader has perhaps already seen reason to believe that the appearance of this latest, ripest, and most ambitious of Morris's works is indeed no ordinary event, and that this new version of the great legend of the North is one of the most signal contributions to English poetry since the writing of Childe Harold.

BRET HARTE.

IT used to be noted thirty years ago by those who knew Europe well that the only American author whose works had been transplanted into all the literary languages, and whose name had struck firm root in foreign soils, was James Fenimore Cooper. You found his novels everywhere, as you found Scott's-in Lisbon, Seville, and Palermo, and Prague and Moscow, Stockholm and Copenhagen-not only crowned with popular favor, but studied and discussed by accomplished and inquisitive intellects, who apparently had never heard of those transatlantic coteries which affected to make light of the Leatherstocking Tales. Marking this phenomenon, the young Bostonian of that day was led to reconsider some of his second-hand opinions, and to query whether such cosmopolitan esteem could be gained without substantial merit. Here, at all events, was a great fact, and he was not unlikely to infer from it that the judgment of other countries anticipates the verdict of the future: that foreign nations are banks of discount competent to cash the drafts which an artist draws upon posterity.

Cooper's is no longer the only American name familiar to cultivated men and women throughout Europe. During recent years the reputation of Bret Harte has grown with signal rapidity, not only in France and Germany,

but in the Latin countries of the South, less prompt to gauge aright the worth of an English book, and even in those capitals of the North, centres of Slavic and Scandinavian activity, which seem to have least in common with the American novelist. Of this fact periodical literature and the book lists of foreign publishers afford sufficient proof. Reviews or translations of Mr. Harte's tales have appeared in critical journals and magazines printed at Lisbon and Madrid; the specific qualities of his work have been more than once examined by that arbiter of Italian opinion, the "Rivista Europea" SacherMasoch, the Galician novelist, who delights to be called an imitator of Bret Harte, has filled the Vienna press with praises of his model, while the name and many of the stories of the American artist are familiar to the readers of the "Moscow Gazette," who, it is safe to say, include all cultivated Russians. Other facts not less pertinent, but more notorious, might be cited, such as the large amount of space given to translations from Bret Harte in the pages of the "Revue des deux Mondes," whose clientèle, we need not remind the reader, embraces the élite of Continental society. We might point also to the circumstance that one of the author's tales was secured for simultaneous publication by the "Deutsche Rundschau," which aims to maintain at Berlin a position analogous to that of M. Buloz's famous Parisian periodical. Now, these are facts whose large significance requires no interpreter; they attest a breadth and solidity of reputation which it would be absurd to claim