Countless books of travel have been written and published, though few of them have met with large sales and fewer still have found a place among works of recognized literary merit. The explanation lies in the fact that this is the most tempting field of letters because apparently the easiest. Every tyro who has been away from home awhile thinks he has materials for a book. But matter without rational form and becoming dress is not literature. Besides, ninety-nine times out of a hundred the tyro has no materials of worth. He has seen only what is on the surface, what everybody else can see for himself, and what therefore everybody else does not want to read about.

One thing which will warrant the writing of books of this class is the fact that one has explored a region of the earth or studied conditions of life little known and not accessible to the world at large. When a Livingstone or a Stanley has penetrated to the heart of the African continent, when a Kane has made an expedition into the Arctic seas, when a Kennan has explored the most hidden horrors of life in Russia and Siberia, the public read with avidity such books as Through the Dark Continent, Arctic Explorations, and Siberia and the Exile System. Or when a naturalist travels over any portion of the earth with a keen eye and a quick ear for the marvels and mysteries of nature, we read with equal delight and profit an Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos and an Agassiz's Journey in Brazil. Yet again, when a man can go among familiar scenes and well-known peoples, and from the materials always to be found there as well as anywhere can construct works of genuine literary

them.

charm and merit, we shall always be ready to welcome Such books are Bayard Taylor's Views Afoot and Longfellow's Outre-Mer.

Let these facts serve as hints to guide us in our writing now. For though we are working here on a smaller scale, the problem before us is practically the same to produce work which shall be valuable for the facts it contains, or interesting for the novelty of those facts, for the original light in which they are exhibited, or for the literary charm with which they are invested. It is certainly well worth while to keep a record of one's wanderings, however limited they may be, if he can succeed in producing such wordpastels as the writer of the following has done.

A LEAF FROM MY DIARY.

Malosand, Sweden, July 15, 1886. -The candle flares so that I can hardly write, yet it is too warm to close the windows. The stars are twinkling outside in all their glory and the little Swedish village lies asleep at my feet. We had such a lovely walk this evening, my sister and I. It was one of those long beautiful summer evenings that are found only in northern countries.

In our stroll we passed by the village square. It is surrounded by low wooden buildings, and in it was a circus. This was the center of attraction for a number of peasant children who were gaping at it in wonder and amazement. The whole scene was so like an American town and yet so different that it made me homesick. We walked on to a little inn and there indulged in some tea and cake, and were surprised to find the total bill to be only six cents.

It was dark when we again emerged into the open air, and nothing broke the perfect stillness of the night save the faint thump, thump of the bass drum coming over the meadow from the distant circus. We paused a moment to take in the tranquillity of the scene and then silently retraced our steps.

J. M. L.

Here is an inexhaustible field. It is preeminently the field of the dramatist, but that does not mean that all who work in it must be what are commonly known as dramatists. Much is dramatic in essence that is not so in form. Many of our best poems and perhaps most of our novels belong in this class. And there are newspaper pen-sketches innumerable that pretend to the same distinction; they are nothing if not dramatic.

What is it to be dramatic? Broadly, it is to be exhibitive of the passions and actions that grow out of any given combination of character and circumstance; it is to be a portraiture of some phase of human life. Balzac has given us a long series of such portraitures in his colossal work La Comédie Humaine, which consists of a number of "scenes from private, provincial, Parisian, political, military, and country life," aiming to give a more or less complete and accurate picture of the France of his day.

What are the requisites of a dramatic writer? First, that requisite of writers and artists in general, a gift for "the earnest and intense seizing of natural facts

-the words are Ruskin's; secondly, a quick, unerring perception of the relations, causal or otherwise, that bind these facts together into a unified whole; lastly, the power to reproduce through the medium of language these facts and relations without diminution of their original force and vitality.

How shall these requisites be acquired? So far as they are acquirable and not dependent on native talent, thus: Observe human nature closely; study it, ponder over it, note and compare; read Shakespeare, Hugo, Browning, Scott, Balzac, Bret Harte, and wrest from them if you can something of their secret; write unceasingly.

For the work now in hand read the court scene in the fourth act of The Merchant of Venice; the opening scene in Romeo and Juliet; read the tales of Kipling and of Bret Harte, the novels of Howells, the ballads of Will Carleton. Portray then, in a realistic manner, any scene from life that you have witnessed, from a street brawl to a presidential inauguration. Let your characters speak and act for themselves—it is the most effective kind of description. Moralize little or not at all; depend on your story to point its own moral.

The compositions written in the last exercise were nothing more or less than chapters from contemporaneous history. They differed from the historical sketches written in Exercise XV. in that they consisted of something more than a narration of events they depicted characters and customs as well. This

may be called pictorial or picturesque history, and we have begun to realize that a history without these characteristics is not worthy of the name. Let us try now to treat chapters from past history in the same way.

It may be objected that past history cannot be written from observation and experience and therefore does not come within the province of this portion of our work. But we have reached the transition point now, and whether this exercise falls upon one side or the other makes little difference. This may be said in favor of placing it here: picturesque history writing is chiefly a matter of the imagination, and the imagination is a kind of second sight. Given a few recorded facts, the imagination reconstructs, from these and from the material furnished the mind by actual observation and experience, scenes that are forever past the power of man to witness otherwise. When one reads, for instance, in the chapter on Pindar in John Addington Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets, a description of the Olympic games, one gets such a vivid picture of the scene that he can hardly believe the author never beheld it. And has he not in truth beheld it? with that mental vision that looks back over two thousand years as easily as over twenty.

Precisely how faithful these reconstructions are we cannot of course determine. But there is about facts