They are quite other from the big forests, from the vast solitary deserts of umbrage peopled with mystery and peril. No doubt they exist in all European countries; they are isolate survivals of the primeval forest, like tiny scattered pools left by the ebb-tide. In England, however, you meet them everywhere and always; they form part and parcel of that sweet intimacy with green things and growing things with which he so soon loses touch who wanders in the wilderness of London. I suppose copse is their generic title, which implies a small wood allowed to grow for cutting, perpetually predestined to axe and fire. But the axe is usually a long time coming; and the copses have all manner of little local names, pet names, with reference to their actual position by hill or hollow. There are shaw and spinney, hurst and holt, dene and dingle, linch and rue, and other terms; which vary in every county, but invariably denote the same endearing qualities, comprehending in one short word the narrow loveliness of the little woods.

As they lack the wild majesty of the great wood, so they are free from its secular terrors, from its grim potentialities of evil which SO troubled our wayfaring forefathers. Robbers, witches, ogres, all the bêtes-noires of forests, would scorn the childlike precincts of the little wood; but fairies might find room to dance there and leave a benison. They have no tales of heroism or chivalry; you shall not meet knight-errant or hardy outlaw riding down the April way. No blare of bugle sounds there, nor twang of bow; no antlers jut between the hazels. Their fastnesses are but woven brambles at the best; their most intricate thickets present no labyrinths to the

resolute. They are full of light, air, color, as they are empty of danger or horror; and when Tennyson alludes in "Maud" to "the dreadful hollow behind the little wood," you feel as if an aspersion of ill company had been cast upon your dearest friend. They offer a shelter for shepherds, a rendezvous for rustic courtship. In spring they are quick with children's voices; in summer the haymakers rest in their oakshadow at noon; in autumn they are an open treasury of nuts and berries. Always they are a-flicker and a-flutter with birds, and their ramparts are alive with rabbits. Hedgehog below, squirrel above, an occasional weasel slinking through, a hare starting out of the herbage, a fox crossing cleared spaces deliberately: the fauna is as limited as its habitat. An American writer complains that the field-life of England brims over too obviously into its woods, flooding them with grass and fern. He avows the authentic wild-wood spirit to be absent,-that privacy of shade, that austere segregation of silvan sight and sound, which characterize the huge tree-tracts of the New World. But it is precisely this frank familiarity of innocence, this Arcadian hand-in-handness with pastoral doings, which is the charm of the little woods. They are like children playing at Red Indians; there is a miniature resemblance, a toy similitude to the real thing, but the elements of size and savagery are at once missing, and the note of crude reality is never even faintly heard. In place of the purr and roar of the giant woodlands, where on a windy day you hear the actual voices of the sea, wave after wave in ordered sequence, deep waters crescent and decrescent; in place of the organ chant of innumerable pinewoods, swelling

and thundering down Gothic aisles "for holy contemplation made," here are the lute and flute and dulcimer, the "tender stops of various quills,"-the chamber-music of Nature. The lark rises trilling from the furrow at the wood-edge; the willow-wren chuckles in the undergrowth. The ringdove croons among the leaves; and across the blackbird's regal phrases, like those of some Beethoven adagio, there strikes the glittering bravura of the nightingale.

But there are no two little woods alike. Every one holds in a corner of his soul the green remembrance of some spot specially beloved. This man recalls a Surrey coppice slanting to a brook, constellate with sweet woodruff and guarding hidden wealth of lily-ofthe-valley. That one cherishes the thought of a Westmoreland wood-slope, where the white wild snowdrops glimmer and curtsy. Another dreams of an East Country thicket along the lakeside, fringed with sedgy grasses, and thrilled with strange cries of waterfowl. Another knows that some day he must inevitably return to an Isle of Wight covert, where, to walk at all, you must trample a thousand primroses as they carpet the broken claycliff to the very edge of the foam; when three nightingales sing all night in May over the tall spires of butterflyorchis standing like carven moonlight. Or to a Hampshire hanger, where, climbing at an angle of sixty degrees, The Spectator.

clutching the horizontal branches, one can search out the hiding-place of rare and magical plants; or a small fir-wood on a hilltop, ringed with purple heather, where a tiny well drops, drops in the dark green silence; or a Southern dingle, threaded by a swift brown stream, whose banks are a-dance with daffodils. Even in the outskirts of brick and mortar the little woods will reach out friendly greeting, as any one will avouch who knows the Highgate bluebells.

Perhaps, all being said, the copses lie nearer to one's heart than any other country joy. They combine the freedom of the field with the color and contour of massed foliage; they are prodigal of exquisite flowers; they are instinct with old loves and comradeships, and the echoes of forgotten years. Even in winter, when the wood-gate creaks on its rusty hinge, and the branch outlines are trellised against a miserable sky, the little woods have welcome for you. For your regaling and entertainment they will proffer, beechnuts buried under fallen leaves, where even the squirrel failed to find them; clear streams of waters talking softly through the shadows. They will prepare you a screen of tangled withered sprays to shelter you briefly from the north wind; and show you infinitesimal shoots of greenness, patiently mysterious under the dead mosses till you come to unravel their meaning.-hieroglyphics of the secret of spring.

May Byron.

Prince Kropotkin's "Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature" has just been published in London.

E. P. Dutton and Co. have in prepa

ration "Letters from Catalonia and Other Parts of Spain" by Rowland Thirlmere. It is a record of the impressions received by the author during his travels through the peninsula.

The work is in two large volumes with many illustrations in color, half-tone, and pen and ink.

It is interesting to note how large a place English literature holds in the lectures announced for the summer term at the German universities. Among the subjects are Byron and his times (which will be treated both at Berlin and at Bonn); Charles Dickens; the Brownings; the Victorian age of English Literature; English Literature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and English elements in German Literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The apparent prosperity of "The Dickensian,"-a magazine especially devoted to Dickens lore-attests the enduring popularity of "Boz." The May number contains an article by Mr. Charles G. Harper, the well-known historian of the roads of England, on the Blue Dragon of "Martin Chuzzlewit," which he illustrates with three of his own drawings. Mr. Harper maintains that the Blue Dragon of the book was the Green Dragon of Alderbury, not the George Inn at Amesbury, as most commentators aver. The number also contains an article by Mr. W. Teignmouth Shore on "Martin Chuzzlewit," and the first of two articles by Mr. Woodford Sowray on "Dickensian Humbugs." The cover design is that of the original parts of "Martin Chuzzlewit."

Professor Hugo Münsterberg's essay on "The Eternal Life" (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) is of brief compass, but it compels thought and, in spite of the author's lucid and cogent style, it will scarcely disclose its deeper meanings to most readers save upon a second or third reading. Professor Münsterberg discusses his subject not as a man of

science nor as a religious believer, but as a philosopher who finds the reality of life in will-acts and will-attitudes, and who holds that the will is outside of time and thus eternal. But he holds also that we have no right to the hope for individual endless duration, and that the friend who died yesterday belongs to a world in which there is no past and future, but an eternal now, that he is linked to it by the will of every person whom he has influenced, and that nothing would be added to his immortal value if some object like him were to enter the sphere of time again. All of which, to the average human soul, will seem chilly consolation by the side of an open grave.

Recalling "The Mysterious Mr. Sabin" not only in the secret of its heroine's birth, but in the dominance of its plot by the central figure, E. Phillips Oppenheim's latest novel, "The Master Mummer," marks an advance on the part of that popular writer. For the fastidious, the literary as well as the moral effect of Mr. Oppenheim's undeniably clever stories has been weakened by the freedom with which he has drawn on the chronicles of the "smart set" for his material, but "The Master Mummer" shows fewer traces of this fault than any of its predecessors, while it has the same ingenuity of construction, deftness in the use of detail, and facility in the infusion of sentiment which have given them their success. The heroine is a mysterious but charming damsel, fresh from the convent school in which she has spent her childhood, and the narrative is concerned with the efforts of the trio of chivalrous young Bohemians who constitute themselves at once her chaperons and knights-errant, to protect her from the schemes of a certain royal family who have a sinister interest in her fate. Little, Brown & Co.