making known the resources of the Library. It has prepared and published a number of bibliographies upon important topics of current interest. Besides these publications on general subjects, under the special care of the bibliographical department, the Library has published a list of maps of North America, a list of newspapers, and a calendar of Washington papers, which display better than any description some of the resources of the divisions of maps, periodicals and manuscripts, respectively.

So large a work cannot be maintained without a considerable force and generous appropriations. The Library service, exclusive of the care of buildings and grounds, employs 256 persons. The executive staff consists of the Librarian, Chief Assistant Librarian and fourteen chiefs of divisions. The appropriation for the Library service in the fiscal year 1901 was $376,488. A further sum of $137,065 for the building and grounds made the aggregate for the year $513,533.

The Librarian of Congress is Mr. Herbert Putnam, who succeeded Mr. John Russell Young in 1899.

ROLAND P. FALKNER, PH. D., (Chief Division of Documents, Library of Corgress), Washington, D. C.

LITERARY REVIEW FOR 1901.-A survey of the more important books of poetry, fiction, science, philosophy, travel, and contemporaneous history for the six months from January to June, 1901, inclusive, even though these are the six months in which comparatively few books are given to the world, is a work of such magnitude that only the more important of the works in these respective departments can be touched upon at all. Even with that limitation, so vast is the field that it is quite possible that more than one work of real importance will be omitted from the ensuing consideration. For, though the duller season of the year in the publishing world, the general prosperity of nations has made it one of great activity. An adequate criticism of all publications in English would be itself a history of the times; for it is probably more true to-day than ever before that movements in both the intellectual and political world find their reflection mirrored in print more closely in point of time than at any other period in the world's history. That this makes for the journalistic quality, rather than the literary, may be taken as a canon of criticism, none the less true because so little insisted upon hereinafter.

POETRY.-Of the actual extent of modern verse-writing few have any adequate conception. In general terms it is safe to say that more poetry of no mean standard is being put forth than ever before in the world's history. Men who would have been accorded permanent rank in English letters at the beginning of the last century are content to rank among the minor versifiers at the beginning of this. The increase in the number of those competent to phrase verses of a certain excellence has had the effect of raising that standard higher and higher. No man may expect consideration at the hands of the critics at this hour who does not possess technical erudition, and unless this grasp of the technique of verse is accompanied by felicity of diction and majesty of thought

in combination, the aspirant for Parnassian honors must be content with enumeration among several hundreds of others, who, like himself, are to be subjects of curious thought in future years rather than of living interest in his own.

The general absence of popular interest in contemporaneous poetry, however excellent, is general through the English-speaking world, though much more marked in the United States than elsewhere. This has had an effect rather paradoxical than otherwise upon the quality of the verse. Lacking a popular demand, no poet is now writing with any view to compensation, since no publisher will undertake the vending of such wares. The poet, therefore, is writing upon an inner "urge," to satisfy his own heart rather than another's, and his glorious art remains the only one of the divine sisterhood uncontaminated by commercial considerations. Undriven by external pressure to comply with the choice of another, he is free in a manner hardly known before in literary history. At the present moment, it is true, this freedom seems to have a tendency to make his unrestricted choice more and more remote from the interests of the many, and the poetry of the critical handful appeals to a world far removed from the verses, secular or religious, which are on the lips of the masses. Kipling alone has bridged the chasm in recent years, but the inevitable tendency of poets in every age to voice the aspirations of the voiceless seems certain, at no distant day, to bring poet and people together once more.

Late last year a new candidate for the favor of poetry-lovers came before the bar of their judgment in the person of Mr. William Vaughn Moody. His book was called "The Masque of Judgment." Few books put forth by an unknown man have shown such skill and dignity, and few have met with more real criticism, attesting the feeling of the critic that here, at last, was a singer of real importance. Among other notes struck in this grandiose drama was that of democracy. Abstract in a work dealing with the great questions of human existence and its future, it becomes concrete in the smaller volume from Mr. Moody's pen given to the world last spring, under the simple title of "Poems." Small in physical extent after the manner of the day-there are only twenty-three titles-it is to be observed that not one of them is lacking in the qualities that have made for the best and highest in poetry from the beginning.

The opening lines, "Gloucester Moors," show certain characteristics which permeate the volume. A close study of nature and the interpretation of her moods in those of humanity. coupled with a sense of the unity of creation and a profound belief in the moral order of the universe, are not the least of these. Under the figure of a huge seafaring vessel the world is typified, leading from a consideration of the little craft sailing out of Gloucester Town to the great question propounded in the closing stanza:

"But thou, vast outbound ship of souls,
What harbor town for thee?
What shapes, when thy arriving tolls,
Shall crowd the banks to see?
Shall all the happy shipmates then
Stand singing brotherly?

RICHARD HOVEY.

Or shall a haggard, ruthless few

Warp her over and bring her to,
While the many broken souls of men
Fester down in the slaver's pen,

And nothing to say or do?"

The poem following, a "Road-Hymn for the Start," shows the poet's attitude toward the life of man, turning the primal curse into his chiefest blessing:

"Leave him still to ease in song Half his little heart's unrest: Speech is his, but we may journey toward the life for which we long.

God, who gives the bird its anguish, maketh nothing manifest,

But upon our lifted foreheads pours the boon of endless quest."

The spirit of revolt, alive in the poetry of the day, finds reconcilement with the eternal purpose in the poem, "The Brute," vastly conceived and splendidly executed. Under the name of the "Brute" the poet gathers all the sordid expressions of man's heart, all his reachings out for wealth and power, and all the exhibitions of his lower nature. But the closing stanzas again show the end to which all these material conquests must come at last:

"In a very cunning tether

He must lead the tyrant weather; He must loose the curse of Adam from the worn neck of the race;

He must cast out hate and fear,

Dry away each fruitless tear,

And make the fruitful tears to gush from the deep heart and clear.

He must give each man his portion, each his

pride and worthy place;

He must batter down the arrogant and lift the

"Then, perhaps, at the last day,
They will whistle him away,

Lay a hand upon his muzzle in the face of
God and say,

'Honor, Lord, the Thing we tamed!

Let him not be scourged or blamed. Even through his wrath and fierceness was Thy fierce wroth world reclaimed!

Honor thou Thy servants' servant; let Thy justice now be shown.'

Then the Lord will heed their saying, and the Brute come to his own,

"Twixt the Lion and the Eagle, by the armpost of the Throne."

In the verses "At Assisi" the same philosophy is heard:

"How long, old builder Time, wilt bide

Till at thy thrilling word

Life's crimson pride shall have to bride

The spirit's white accord,

Within that gate of good estate

Which thou must build us soon or late,

Hoar workman of the Lord?"

The briefest summary must suffice for other notable sentiments in as many poems. In "Good Friday Night" the brotherhood of Christ, in "An Ode in Time of Hesitation" the feeling of uncertainty over the new policy of the American people toward their new possession, in "Until the Troubling of the Waters" the whole subject of healing by faith, in "The Menagerie" the divine purpose of evolution, and in "The Daguerreotype" the guardianship of a mother's soul over her son-all these things are given poetic phrasing which makes the poet welcome among the greatest singers of our race.

Mr. Moody was born in Spencer, Ind., July 8, 1869, and graduated from Harvard in 1893. He is assistant professor of English in the University of Chicago, and his manifold merits have received such recognition from the university authorities that he is to be left free to gain experience in the outer world and write

during more than half of every year. No American man of letters has a brighter future, and none seems destined to make a better use of it. In "Herod: A Tragedy" Mr. Stephen Phillips, the most promising of the younger men in England. has made his fourth noteworthy contribution to English verse. This is more openly dramatic than his former play, "Paolo and Francesca," and designed to serve as a spectacle as well. But it lacks the insistent felicity of phrase which gave distinction to much of the poet's earlier work, and there is a failure also of the theme. This is phrased by the Physician at the close of the tragedy, when mental death has fallen upon its protagonist:

"Rest, and a world of leaves, and stealing stream

Or solemn swoon of music may allure

Homeward the ranging spirit of the king.

These things avail: but these things are of man.

To me, indeed, it seems, who with dim eyes

Behold this Herod motionless and mute,

To me it seems that they who grasp the world,

The kingdom and the power and the glory,

Must pay with deepest misery of spirit.

Atoning unto God for a brief brightness.

And ever ransom, like this rigid king,

The outward victory with inward loss."

This is a subject worthy the greatest of talents. But Mr. Phillips has been content to let the physical blessings and mental sufferings of Herod fall as mere coincidences, rather than to make them inseparable concomitants of his career. It may be conjectured that his art has suffered through setting it tasks, rather than permitting it to wait for inspiration. Like the former play, "Herod" was written upon order.

Drama of another and wholly different genre is found in the new work of Mr. William Butler Yeats, the leader in English of that Neo-Celtic movement which exhibits so much vitality.

In "The Shadowy Waters" Mr. Yeats has contrived to write a poem of no great length in heroic measure and dramatic form, wherein no Christian thought is permitted to intrude itself upon an interpretation of Irish paganry and superstition. The scene is set upon a galley in mid-ocean. Forgael, an Irish prince, has set sail in search of his love at the world's end and describes his purpose thus:

"When I hold

A woman in my arms, she sinks away
As though the waters had flowed up between;

And yet, there is a love that the gods give,
When Aengus and his Edaine wake from sleep
And gaze on one another through our eyes,
And turn brief longing and deceiving hope
And bodily tenderness to the soft fire
That shall burn time when times have ebbed

away.

The fool foretold me I would find this love
Among those streams, or on their cloudy edge."
To this Aibric, his lieutenant, makes reply:
"No man nor woman has loved otherwise
Than in brief longing and deceiving hope

And bodily tenderness; and he who longs
For happier love but finds unhappiness,
And falls among the dreams the drowsy gods
Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world
And then smooth out with ivory hands and
sigh."-

The beauty of the work is great and so forms a worthy addition to Mr. Yeats' readily remarkable contributions to the spirit of our English poesy. Two of his followers have also sought to interpret Celtic feeling in English measures with no little success-Mr. Herbert

Trench in "Deirdre Wed," and Mr. Stephen Gwynn in several shorter poems gathered under the name of "The Queen's Chronicler."

A melancholy interest attaches to the collected poems of Philip Henry Savage, a young Bostonian who died in the beginning of his promise. Of the same sort are the late Richard Hovey's contributions to "Last Songs from Vagabondia," in which, like the two former books of similar title, Mr. Bliss Carman is a collaborator. Miss Josephine Preston Peabody, in "Fortune and Men's Eyes," a little comedy cast upon the Sonnets of Shakespeare, has gone another step toward securing her place as the most promising of American woman-poets. Mr. John Stuart Thomson, one of the best known of the Canadian singers, has increased his reputation greatly by a new volume, "A Day's Song," which contains a glowing ode to "Autumn."

One of the tendencies of the day is to take from the reader the delights of personal investigation and discovery among the poets, and to this end there has been a remarkable production of anthologies. The Neo-Celtic move

MISS GWENDOLEN OVERTON.

ment can be studied through "A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue," edited by Dr. Stopford A. Brooke and Mr. T. W. Rolleston; the beautiful outburst of melody from Canadian songsters since the growth of national feeling in the Dominion through "A Treasury of Canadian Verse," edited by Dr. Theodore H. Rand; the trend of religious verse in the United States through a new and enlarged edition of "A Treasury of American Sacred Song," edited by Mr. W. Garrett Horder; "The Poets and Poetry of Indiana," in a volume bearing that title, edited by Messrs. Benjamin S. Parker and Enos B. Heiney, and the verse of the Southern States of the Union in "Selections from the Southern Poets," prepared by Mr. William Lander Weber. The "Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900," done by Mr. A. T. Quiller-Couch, is rather interesting as showing the anthologist's taste in

verse, and for the modern examples with which it closes, than for any more scholarly reason. Translations, from various hands, have been made into English verse of the poems of Leopardi, of Alcæus, of M. Rostand's "L'Aiglon," of M. de Hérédia's "Les Trophées," and of certain Hebrew poets, published as "Songs of Exile," by Miss Nina Davis, the translator. In addition, Dean Henry Carrington has put forth "An Anthology of French Poetry," an inclusive and instructive work of real poetic value.

Mr. John Churton Collins has edited "The Early Poems of Tennyson" in a manner most thorough, enabling the student to trace for himself the successive changes in the language of the poet and containing several numbers discarded from his collected works.

FICTION. So many are the novels and romances poured upon the reading world, and so subordinate, as a rule, are literary qualifications to the tale they have to tell, that their interest is that of the popular journal to a marked degree. It may be easily conjectured that a century hence our contemporaneous stories, short and long, will be objects of interest to the sociologist and the historian rather than to the student of letters. In no department of the world of books is there so little manifestation of enduring vitality. A temporary success is all that either writer or publisher cares to aim at as a primary object, and the art of novel writing is greatly debased thereby, its products sinking to the level of so much merchandise. By dint of extensive advertising. sometimes descending in its methods to the level of that done by the advance agent of a circus, certain books of no striking merit have been pushed into editions of almost fabulous numbers, debasing the taste of the reader with all the rest of its evils. So far has this been carried that the judicious have reason to beware of a much talked-about novel, and to find their gratification only in the comparatively few books by authors of accomplishment who are working for posterity rather than the light pleasure of the passing moment.

This has been a six months of historical novels, using the word in a rather broad sense to set off stories of a day departed as distinguished from a day still with us. Among the numerous books which find their subject in American history, "The Making of Christopher Ferringham," by Miss Beulah Marie Dix, seems to be one of the best in both conception and execution. Her hero is a young cavalier, exiled to the province of Massachusetts Bay by a Roundhead uncle after being captured in battle. He is taken into the family of his aunt, whose husband is one of those uncompromising Puritans who have done so much to make America all that it is-and is not. The strictness of life in seventeenth century New England seems like hypocrisy to the lad, and he revolts against it in the most pathetic manner, kicking his feet against the pricks and gaining the sympathies of the reader to a marked degree. His sufferings are seen later to be instrumental in working out his salvation, a feat he accomplished after the manner of mankind, by himself. It is the peculiar excellence of this novel to show Americans their ancestors in a light far from favorable, and yet to leave them in full comprehension of all

ARTHUR S. PIER.

that this severe discipline has led us to become. The book is essentially virile and filled with romantic episode. Coming down to the revolutionary period, out of innumerable books, "The Son of a Tory," by Mr. Clinton Scollard, may claim attention because of its careful and poetic working out of the postulate that human nature, even in times so heroic as we are disposed to consider those which brought us national independence, is in no way different from our own. By taking a rather unsophisticated village youth in the Mohawk Valley at the time of Johnson's raid, Mr. Scollard has portrayed the conflicting emotions of the day most convincingly.

The increase of interest in the southwestern corner of our national domain has led to the novel of "John Charity." written by Mr. Horace Annesley Vachell, to-day the leading novelist of the Pacific region. With fine understanding of the Latin mind, Mr. Vachell has drawn a picture of California just before the American annexation of the region, bringing out the pastoral life of the Spanish aristocracy of that time, with Mexican vaqueros, Roman priests, and now and again an ominous character of our own race to point out the inevitable end. It is romance almost melodramatic in its wealth of incident, but well constructed and strongly and artistically written.

It

"Martin Brook" is by Mr. Morgan Bates, a journalist and playwright of good repute. holds a powerful and commanding figure in the person of its hero, an uncompromising abolitionist in ante-bellum days. What makes the novel singular among its kind is the fact that Brook turns preacher, and as a Methodist entirely devoted to his faith shows us one of the commonest of our national types between the covers of a novel not professedly nor cantingly religious. The story ends with the freeing of the slave. If Central New York is the scene of Mr. Bates' story, New Jersey is appropriated by the late Mary Harriott Norris for the home of the principal actors in "The Grapes of Wrath." The characters are equally divided between North and South, and the internecine

Rich

nature of the struggle made manifest. mond after its fall is done in colors most vivid and clear, and the work is in every way worthy. One of the most dreadful scourges of war finds exploitation in "The Arrows of the Almighty," by Mr. Owen Johnson, who paints with steady brush the corruption of army officials and contractors during the strife between the States. Though his first work, Mr. Johnson displays a vigor which promises still better things, his book being well put together and of unfailing interest.

Miss Gwendolen Overton, a young woman of Los Angeles, Cal., was wholly unknown as a writer until her powerful novel of the Southwestern frontier in the 'seventies, "The Heritage of Unrest," commanded recent attention. The persons of the book are drawn from the army chiefly, but deal with the settler and the Indian in the interrelations of the three. The heroine is the daughter of a private soldier of good birth and an Apache squaw, and though her character does not bring entire conviction it stands against an historical background of unswerving reality and veracity.

Nothing done by any writer of English in several years shows more crude power than "The Octopus" of Mr. Frank Norris. It is the first of a number of recent works of fiction, and the only one not written by a professed journalist, which has for its object the exposure of one or another social iniquity. The "Octopus" here is the Southern Pacific Railway, and the deeds described relate to the seizure of lands in the San Bernadino Valley by that powerful and unscrupulous corporation. Mr. Norris's work is always powerful, painstaking and realistic. His style savors overmuch of the methods of M. Zola, but his theme is similar and he himself still in early youth. This book is the first of a promised sequence of three, the others to deal with a grain corner in Chicago and with a famine in Europe, respectively. In "The Sentimentalists" Mr. Arthur Stanwood Pier has shown his readers the corruptions of a state legislature; at the same time he has pointed out the intellectual decline of Boston society. In "Days Like These"