will "turn up," it is almost certain that he will present himself attractively. This book is a series of essays on subjects of psychical research and the like. As the author's Custom and Myth showed the permanence of certain folk stories throughout the world's history, the present volume sets forth the resemblances between psychic phenomena of widely various times and places. Clearly, no single age or country can boast a monopoly of levitation, second-sight, spirittappings, and haunted houses. It is amusing, by the way, to remember in connection with the treatment of this last topic the clever lines The Haunted Homes of England, in the recent volume of verses. The Law of Psychic Phenomena, a Working Hypothesis for the Systematic Study of Hypnotism, Spiritism, Mental Therapeutics, etc., by Thomson Jay Hudson. (McClurg.) Mr. Hudson essays to bring the results of a number of students and experimenters into a comprehensive order, and his working hypothesis which is to systematize these results is that the duality of man furnishes the explanation. He presents this hypothesis in three terms that man has two minds, an objective and a subjective; that the objective mind is constantly amenable to control by suggestion; and that the subjective mind is incapable of inductive reasoning. Science. The Physiology of the Senses, by John Gray M'Kendrick and William Snodgrass. (Scribners.) One of the series of University Extension Manuals. The aim of the book, as explained in the preface, is "to give a succinct account of the functions of the organs of sense as these are found in man and the higher animals." The work is confined pretty strictly to this purpose, and the authors appear to have yielded only in a very slight degree to the temptation to make excursions into the field of physiological psychology. — The Science of Mechanics, a Critical and Historical Exposition of its Principles, by Dr. Ernst Mach. Translated from the second German edition by Thomas J. McCormack. (The Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago.) Dr. Mach's method is to treat successively the development of the principles of statics and dynamics by reference to the results obtained by the great philosophers, from Archimedes downward, subjecting each to a critical analysis. Then he considers the extension of the principles discovered in the deduction of mod ern science, and finally examines the formal as distinguished from the deductive development of physical science. A brief final chapter discusses the relations of mechanics to other departments of knowledge. -Total Eclipses of the Sun, by Mabel Loomis Todd. (Roberts.) The first volume in the Columbian Knowledge Series. A lively and well-illustrated little book, which is descriptive, explanatory, historical, and readable. Mrs. Todd answers, before they are asked, all the questions that the layman would be likely to ask regarding this curious subject. Religion. The Spirit of God, by P. C. Mozoomdar. (Geo. H. Ellis, Boston.) A most interesting book in its personal, and probably to a large extent representative expression of the fusion of Christianity and Hinduism in the faith of the Brahmo-Somaj. How active is the life which results we cannot say; it is not easy to determine in any such statement the devotional, contemplative spirit and the energizing principle. But there is a very sweet, pure note in this volume, rendering it a beautiful exposition of one of the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, and helping the Christian student to an apprehension of the universality of the doctrine. The Meaning and the Method of Life, a Search for Religion in Biology, by George M. Gould. (Putnams.) Dr. Gould essays to explain, through living organisms, the presence of the invisible force which makes them living. But does he not make a fundamental error in separating the apparently active organisms from the apparently inactive ones? Perhaps, if his theory could carry with it a more penetrating sight, he would double the force of the theory. hind his cloud of words there is light which breaks through now and then in a warming as well as illuminating fashion. - How to Begin to Live Forever, by J. M. Hodson. (Randolph.) Neither better nor worse than a thousand and one other sermon-like tracts still unpublished. Be Travel and Adventure. Hawaii, by Anne M. Prescott. (Chas. A. Murdock & Co., San Francisco.) A paper-covered book of 250 pages, giving, apparently, in the form of letters, a variety of bits of information, comment, and sentiment respecting Hawaii, by a lady who appears to have been a resident, and perhaps a teacher, in Honolulu. It is intelligently written; it yields rather frequently to the seductive charm of the air, - but it is in good taste. An appendix gives considerable statistical and recent historical information. Miss Prescott's sympathy appears to be with the late queen, but it is not obtruded. The Kingdom of the "White Woman," a Sketch, by M. M. Shoemaker. (Robert Clarke & Co., Cincinnati.) Fifteen years ago Mr. Shoemaker spent a winter in Mexico, when it had not become the great resort for travelers it now is, and this volume is, in effect, the portfolio of a man of letters, studies, sketches, occasional pictures; many of them interesting either in subject or treatment, and none over-labored. The book, besides, has several half-tone pictures, chiefly of views, which poorly represent the author's own artistic sense. Famous Adventures and Prison Escapes of the Civil War. (The Century Co.) A group of seven sketches detailing such thrilling experiences as Colonel Rose's Tunnel at Libby Prison, the Locomotive Chase in Georgia, and the Escape of General Breckinridge. The adventures and exploits were on both sides, and the narrators are those who took some part in the scenes. Thus the stories are at first hand, and they form a permanent contribution to our history. Such incidents make novels tame. Textbooks and Education. Logic, Inductive and Deductive, by William Minto. (Scribners.) One of the University Extension Manuals. Professor Minto has attempted, in this manual, to put the study of logical formulæ on a historical basis, and to increase the power of logic as a practical discipline. In the latter regard, he has rendered his book especially valuable by taking illustrations of errors from familiar and yet far-reaching instances, and introduces thus a considerable body of highly instructive fact. Throughout the book one perceives the presence of a quickening spirit. - The Science of Education, by Johann Friedrich Herbart. (Heath.) The translation of this classic of pedagogy, published first in Germany in 1806, must prove of inestimable service to teachers, particularly to those-and they are many - who forever tend to shrink and harden into mere schoolmasters. It will enlarge their conception of the aim and scope of education, and put mere instruction in its right perspective. At the same time, it will give to the part the schoolmaster plays a new meaning and dignity. The new philosophy will pick a few flaws- -the wonder will be how very few-in Herbart's ethics and psychology, and in his application of these sciences to education; but the enthusiasm and large - mindedness of the book before us must make it, for teachers, permanently inspiring. Public Libraries in America, by William I. Fletcher. (Roberts.) To a reading man this little volume is truly fascinating, for it sets forth in excellent order the history, function, organization, and methods of public libraries; it shows what is to be expected; it illustrates buildings and librarians; and is throughout marked by precision, good judgment, and enthusiasm. To the young man or woman entering on the noble vocation of librarianship it is of great service, and a patriotic American may well take pride in the movement which it celebrates. History of Modern Philosophy, by Richard Falckenberg. (Holt.) The translation before us, by Professor Armstrong of Wesleyan, is from the second edition (1892) of Professor Falckenberg's admirable work. It has the benefit, however, of additions and corrections sent on by the author, and of a practically new section on British and American philosophy by the translator. Thus we have here, for the period which the history covers, the period from Nicolas of Cusa to the present time, the latest, and, for its purposes, the best compendious account of modern philosophy. It will serve not only, of course, as a textbook, but for the general reader as well. Elementary Composition and Rhetoric, by W. E. Mead. (Leach, Shewell & Sanborn, Boston.) The most vital thing in this little book is Professor Mead's belief that students should be brought up to look upon composition not as a mere school exercise, but as something real. For this very reason, oddly enough, Professor Mead devotes a third of his book to stock subjects, model plans,' and the like, instead of emphasizing the uselessness and the danger of doing anything but inducing a pupil to choose subjects out of his own experience, and to treat them in his own way. To such, however, as seem hopelessly blind to their own experience, this simple and generally sensible little book may be of some transient use. Otherwise it hardly makes good any reason for existThe Step-Ladder, a Collection of Prose and Poetry, designed for Use in Children's Classes in Elocution, and for Supplementary Reading in Public and Private - ence. Schools, by Margaret A. Klein. (A.S. Barnes & Co., New York.) A better selection than one usually finds in books of this class, though it is not altogether easy to see the ground of the compiler's classification or the end to be attained. Essays and Reprints. Ruminations, The Ideal American Lady, and Other Essays, by Paul Siegvolk. (Putnams.) There is an air of sobriety about these papers which takes one back to a school of staid American writers who followed Irving at a distance, Tuckerman being perhaps the best illustration of the class. The reflections are sensible, eminently respectable, and sometimes charged with solid wisdom, but the manner is not very enlivening, and the leisure which they suggest is a somewhat sleepy leisure. The topics touched on, or rather handled, are, Concerning Women, Touches of Nature, Every-Day Talk, Shreds of Character, Social Hints and Studies, Author and Artist, Concerning Life and Death. In Maiden Meditation, by E. V. A. (McClurg.) The compiler and writer of this little book describes it as a "simple record of a woman's moods, caprices, tendernesses, dreams." Under the titles, After the Ball, After Dinner, After Church, After a Wedding, After One Summer, she embroiders upon her own personal reflection suggestions from her reading so deftly that it is not easy to say what is her own and what borrowed. The general effect is light and agreeable, and perhaps the secret is disclosed when she says: "Often when sewing or dressing, I have before me a book with marked passages or a newspaper clipping that I am couning again and again, or I am repeating some verse or sentiment that has struck my fancy. I believe that the most delightful and satisfactory education is gained in this way, little by little, until it is wrought in the memory, is a part of one's being, and seems but the echo of one's thought." But not every one can thus make bits of stuff form a graceful pattern. - Two more numbers of the Temple Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing (Macmillan), continue the pleasure which this delightful little edition is giving readers of Shakespeare. We might almost "readers" in distinction from "students," since the scheme of editing is such as to be most agreeable to those who wish to enjoy their Shakespeare intelligently. say The Last of the Great Poets of France. THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB. AT the burial of Leconte de Lisle in the Paris cemetery of Montparnasse, on Saturday, July 21 of this year, French letters seemed to be mourning the century's end. The poet had died four days before, in the house of Meyerbeer's niece, for whose gracefully feminine book (La Voie Douloureuse, signed "Jean Dornis ") he had written his last words to the world of letters in a preface full of his fine Olympian disdain for the romance of realism. The names of those who walked in procession to do him a last honor, or who had heaped his funeral car with flowers, reached from the veteran poet and politician Auguste Vacquerie, who was of the household of Victor Hugo, and Judith Gautier, to the daintiest of the new generation, like Stephen Liégeard and Paul Hervieu. President Casimir-Perier trampled once more on the protocole century which is soon to begin? Who can say?" Yet more pronounced in the same sense was the third brief panegyric, by M. de Heredia, the latest successful French poet, though not the youngest either in matter or in form: "France has lost the last of her great poets. None shall take up the sceptre which he received from the failing hands of Victor Hugo." Perhaps only the Olympians become immortal in the after-life of literary fame. Certainly, nothing could have been more remote from the doings of the every-day world than the career of Leconte de Lisle. Born and reared in an island of the southern seas, there was no creole softness of human sympathy manifest in him. Once only has he confided something of himself to his hewn and chiseled cyclopean verse. It is, very briefly, that one whom he had seen passing down the mountain side in the sweet mornings of his own youth "Dans ta grâce naïve et ta rose jeunesse " now lies sleeping beneath the wild grass that grows along the arid sands by the sea, far away at La Réunion. "Maintenant, dans le sable aride de nos grèves, A lifetime in Paris had not destroyed this charm of early dreams that came in a land where no great city was, and few dwellers to break outwardly the solitude which resounded interiorly with the mighty echoes of Homer. Those who can appreciate, to their own satisfaction, the qualities of a poet only when they can label them diversely make out Leconte de Lisle at once a pessimist and a Buddhist. But remembering his enchanted youth and the rude independence of character he had inherited from his Breton ancestors, it is not necessary to seek for names before understanding the threefold quality of his work. His youth was scarcely over when he was first confronted with the great world. Sainte-Beuve, to whom he had a favorable introduction, invited him to dine, aud recite some of his verses before two of the literary celebrities of the day, now utterly forgotten. One of these, an old man forgetful of his cue, surprised the young poet, who had not yet published a line, by greeting him effusively, "Happy to press the hand that has written such beautiful things!" In spite of his revolt at such manifest insincerity, Leconte de Lisle went through his part, and, with the dessert, recited his first, and, as time has proved, his most famous piece, "Midi, roi des étés épandu sur la plaine !" The noonday splendor of such verse at least won the sincere admiration of the great critic, and Sainte-Beuve's Causerie of the next Monday was given over to the new poet. The praise passed unheeded by a generation that was everywhere drunk with the revolutionary wine of 1848. "On what did you live, master," asked a disciple, when the poet, after many years of waiting, had become a chef d'école, " between your twentieth and fortieth year?" "On privations and Greek roots," was the grim reply. It should, perhaps, be noted that, in these later years of comparative fame, Leconte de Lisle could never hear without a quiver of revulsion that first piece, which even young ladies had now learned to recite as a compliment to his presence. The climax was reached when Alexandre Dumas fils, who had been appointed to receive him into the French Academy, found nothing better in his work wherewith to adorn the solemn discourse of reception. From disappointment and grinding poverty, and a sad irony that often goes along with such timidity as made the poet almost fiercely haughty at first approach, came the pessimism which astonishes in so uneventful a life. "Oni! le mal éternel est dans sa plénitude! L'air du siècle est mauvais aux esprits ulcérés. This disposition, as his verse had but just recounted, arises in the spirit of the man who, "held by weariness, turns pensive back toward the forgotten days." And the Buddhism, if such it be, can spring only from the yet earlier days, when life and death and all things that do but seem were contemplated in the solitude and under the sun of the tropics, where the universal light makes the individual to pale and fade. "Et toi, divine Mort, où tout rentre et s'efface, But it must have been that early and almost exclusive reading of Homer which gave to Leconte de Lisle's verse its savagely classical character. He remitted never an iota in the strictest rules of French versification, and the resonant roll of his alexandrines would have pleased the severest classicist of them all. "Marmorean verse was his own special praise of what he admired in Victor Hugo, whose romanticism was not carried into the form of his best lines. Leconte de Lisle could not endure the fantastic meddling of the younger school with French prosody. Yet his own language had an Oriental richness under all its Greek emphasis; and Theodore de Banville said truly that "he forged gold in his workshop." Fran Fortune and popular fame could never come to such a poet. But something better happened to him. A choice circle of disciples gathered round him in the seventies, and from them came the last renaissance of poetry in France. Three of them are already consecrated by the Academy, çois Coppée, Sully-Prudhomme, and De Heredia. Catulle Mendès and Verlaine were of the number. There were yet others who were not poets, such as Anatole France, who, with Alexandre Dumas père and Leconte de Lisle, once perpetrated a― Dictionnaire de Cuisine! and two years ago refused, lovingly, to fight a duel with the fiery old poet. All these were Parnassiens; it is their master who has died. -I suppose that when civil The Old-Time Politician. service reform has become established in its widest application, the oldtime politician will be an extinct animal whose lineaments are preserved only in literature; and doubtless such a consummation is to be desired. The reformers tell us so, and all respectable people are, or pretend to be, reformers. Nevertheless, in the confidence of the Club, I venture to say that the old-time politician had his good points. It might even be contended, without manifest absurdity, that he is (or was) the last lingering exponent of Feudalism. The essential characteristic of Feudalism I take to be that, under it, the relation between one man and another was based partly on self-interest, partly on kindly feeling. There was protection on the one side, and there was dependence on the other, the sense of responsibility and the sense of loyalty; so that between superior and inferior there was a give-and-take of mutual good will and advantage. Whereas, under our modern, democratic, competitive system, the only bond between man and man is that of pure self-interest, the "cash nexus." The old-time politician had his feudal superiors and his feudal inferiors : he looked up to and obeyed the former, he looked after and protected the latter. He was a genial, sociable fellow, and, above all things, sympathetic. Governor Andrew used to say, “I like folks ;" and that was the characteristic of the typical politician. Of course he cultivated and exaggerated this feeling, and sometimes he was actually cold-hearted, his apparent sympathy being mere affectation. I was once introduced to an ex-governor of Massachusetts, a man who was, and still is, extremely popular. We met in a business office where some business was in progress, and I really think that he tumbled over half a dozen chairs before he got near enough to grasp my hand. He shook it warmly, and smiled an unctuous smile. Then I understood, as I never had done before, why he was so popular. This was one type of politician, but not the best nor even the most common type. I remember another meeting with another politician, -no less a person than a Senator of the United States. With this man's career I had long been familiar. I had read his speeches and knew his history, and often I had wondered what might be the secret of his success, for he had shown no indication of strong intellect or of strong character. When I met him, the mystery was solved. He had in a very high degree that sympathetic quality of which I am speaking. There was a native kindliness, a fellow-feeling about him, which gave a certain charm to everything that he said or did, and carried with it a conviction of sincerity. No doubt he had fostered this quality, and perhaps he professed a little more than he felt; still, there was something there by nature, a genuine sympathy with and concern for his fellow-men. Such a quality is a very beautiful one, and it ought to be attractive. Probably it was this gift which made Franklin Pierce a President of the United States, and an intimate friend of Hawthorne. Historically considered, Franklin Pierce's personality |