guages indifferently well, and seemed to have seen a good deal of the shady side of Continental life. He had been a superior spy in the French police of the last empire, and in that capacity had met with rather queer experiences. I persuaded him to reduce certain of his recollections to writing, and giving some study to the subject thus suggested, and obtaining further information from other quarters, I worked the whole up into a series of articles for the London weekly, and was paid therefor at the rate of five guineas each; as I wrote fourteen, this made me sixty guineas, after paying my ex-spy fifty dollars for his trouble. The most I have ever made by my pen in one month is two hundred dollars, but my average earnings fall short of this sum by at least fifty dollars. Perhaps if I were totally dependent on literature for my living I should work harder and earn more, although as it is I think I work pretty hard. At the same time I dare say I write more slowly and with greater difficulty than men who have devoted the greater part of their lives to the calling of letters.

I am now writing a series of articles for another London weekly, not the one with which I began, of large circulation, at two guineas each; and as the editor does not like articles to run more than a column and a half, and the column averages about seven hundred words, the pay is not bad. The ordinary rate of the Saturday Review is three guineas for two columns, and the large London dailies generally pay correspondents at the rate of two guineas the column. Leader writers are specially retained and well paid: the leader writers on the Times get from £1200 to £1500 a year; the editor has £2000, and the manager £5000, a year. Nobody seems to know, or to be able to guess, the annual gains of the Times, but the popular imagination puts them down at somewhere about a quarter of a million. The great city leaf," as German papers are in the habit of calling their mighty contemporary, is noted in the press world for its liberality with its employees. A man once on the Times

may consider himself provided for for life, if he does his duty. The difficulty of getting on may be estimated from the fact that the number of fully qualified candidates for situations, all waiting anxiously for their turn, is scarcely ever less than fifteen hundred. Not that the proprietors confine themselves in their selection for vacancies to the names on their list; they take a good man, especially when they want a leader writer or foreign correspondent, wherever they find him.

It goes without saying that the Times must be organized almost to perfection in all its departments; nevertheless there is an old-fashioned something in its ways of doing business, an absence of shabbiness, a loftiness of manner, and a clinging to ancient forms, exceedingly refreshing in these days of fussiness, push, and frantic competition. For instance, when the Times has to make you a remittance, it does not, as other papers do, send you a check, though a Times check would probably be good for any amount up to a million sterling that might be inscribed thereon; it sends you a Bank of England post-bill. If you call at the office for your account, you are paid in crisp bank-notes or gold coin of the realm, and as the kindly paymaster and publisher hands you the cash he exchanges a few friendly words with you, and, as likely as not, offers you a pinch of snuff. You are not hustled in at one door and hurried out at another, like a bale of goods; no hook-nosed cashier tries to cut down your little bill, and if there be in it, perchance, a doubtful item, the Times gives you the benefit of the doubt. It is a very lord among journals, and it will be quite in accordance with the fitness of things if, as runs the rumor, the principal proprietor of the Times is made a peer. Very different is the treatment accorded by the half-penny prints to their contributors. I once wrote a number of articles for one of them, dozen, perhaps. When I made inquiry of the manager touching the rate of remuneration to be expected, I was oracularly informed that he would decide the point on a review of the articles, and

some half

when I applied for payment he sent me a check for exactly £5 13s. 6d., “in discharge of all demands," as the form of receipt which I had to sign stated that the amount in question was paid for literary work performed for the

between certain dates.

I have written at so great length about my journalistic experiences that I have left myself scant space for my experiences about books; for I have published two, and have at this moment two more on the stocks. The first I wrote met with a most flattering reception from the critics; no slight thing of the sort could have been more warmly welcomed, but the press is sometimes warm when the public is cold, and though my work has brought me some glory it has gained me no guineas. Of the second, as it is only just out, it is too soon to speak, but I take much hope from the fact that the approval of the reviewers has not been nearly so cordial or unanimous as in the first instance; if the public should deign to smile on this my second effort the applause and blame of critics will be equally indifferent to me.

Not long ago, a certain gentleman moved into Boston, that his family might enter the best society, whatever that might be. With rare foresight, he did not at once buy a house, as he wished thoroughly to understand the social defenses of the city before establishing himself before any one of them; neither did he seek a small boarding-house, lest he should become involved with those whom later it would be best to ignore; nor did he care to keep house in an apartment hotel, as therein he might always remain unknown. So he engaged rooms at a large family hotel, where "transients" were infrequent; there he and his household had fine opportunities for observation, as is testified by the following extracts, lately sent by his daughter to a friend of mine:

"It is easy to obtain culture in this city," she writes, "for there are lectures and schools of all kinds; and as the word culture passes from its Emersonian breadth of meaning to a knack at halfsayings, half suggestions, offered in a

thoughtful, drawling manner, I suppose I can pass as cultured. I am also cultivating an intuitive' manner. I mean that I have learnt to stand or sit, holding my hands calmly crossed, just below the colored bow which fastens my long white fichu, and, on being introduced to a stranger, to start slightly, glance up, gaze penetratingly, and say, I thought it was you; I have read your writings.' One must not say, I have read your books,' because that might not be safe, but everybody who is anybody has written some kind of an article. Oh, that such a remark might be made to me!

"Last night I met, at a reception, an Englishman connected with some paper (perhaps the Times, as that has so many connections'), who wore shaggy clothes and broad cravat to hide that which may have possessed at two of its extremities wristbands, but which were not visible. His mustache and beard were bushy and reddish, and his voice portentous, his manner hurried and note-bookish, and he looked with twinkling eyes upon all around, above, beneath. His first remarks were: Do you come here often? Are coffee and cake universal substitutes for elaborate suppers?' I answered, in a transcendental manner, that culture craved but Mocha berry and sponge-drops. Very good,' he said, if one knows it beforehand, but if one does not' and sighed and expanded himself. He then asked me if I wrote prose, poetry, or newspaper leaders, and on receiving three mournful negatives added, despairingly, What do you do? Are there any literary people here?' 'I will introduce you to some,' said I, humbly, but internally angry, if you will first be presented to my friend, Mrs.

.' He asked her the same questions that he had me, and finding that she also had never written exclaimed, What are you here for? Because I am next-door neighbor,' she replied, whereat he left us both.

"Now it will not do for me to be 'next-door neighbor.' I want modestly to make my way into good society, but caste obtrudes itself here, as everywhere

else. The best way to advance one's self is to join some society. I wish to be very careful in my selection of one; then I may succeed in becoming cultured or important. To join the wrong society would be fatal, though simple membership alone would not cause irretrievable disgrace.

"It is not wise to rely on church connections, for they chiefly help in Sundayschool and sewing-school directions; all kinds of people teach in them, and the most fashionable churches prefer gentlemen superintendents. The question of age also embarrasses me, as very young girls and those who have given up society are the instructors in such schools, and since statistics are creeping into religious affairs my age might be asked. A fashionable charity would be as helpful as a fashionable educational project; but the first is practical, the latter cultured, and leads to the hearing of and reading papers. More than half the people I want to know read papers, and invite one to parlor lectures, which are very pleasant, if one need not buy a ticket. Physiological and hygienic plans are more or less allied with co-education, and that, at present, is not safe; charity work is agreeable, when the poor come to one in an office, and though they tell distressing stories, one's self-reproach is not so poignant as if one went to see them. Yet I find that many of the very best people visit the poor in their homes, and say that is the only way in which pauperism can be lessened. As a matter of taste, I prefer to employ missionaries and Biblereaders, or to give out garments and soup over a counter. Industrial work, such as cooperative societies, building associations, and training-schools, is perfectly safe, but one must know facts and compute the average cost per head of one or another plan, and such exact knowledge is painful to me. Decorative art and drawing-schools are now fashionable, and I hope that by the means of burlap and bulrushes (they cannot be hard to design) I may yet win distinction. Clubs are too radical and progressive in science and thought, and on

joining them one is liable to be asked about her convictions in regard to religion and duty; and if one has only inherited ideas, one is considered as lacking in an appreciative or inquiring mind. I think, on the whole, that I shall join some purely educational society, as that will not compromise me. I can listen to discussions on literature, the higher education, and the state of our schools and universities, but need not speak myself if I subscribe handsomely to some one or two plans, dress well, and look wise. Thus I hope to enter society.

"The best society in the city is not fashionable, but is sensible, intelligent, well-bred, and Christian, and does not ask personal questions, which is a great relief. I have heard it whispered that there is a still higher or very best society, composed of a few statesmen and authors (but their grandfathers must have been farmers, like other people's grandfathers). Seriously speaking, the moral atmosphere of this city has greatly impressed me. The people here are thoroughly in earnest. Often one per

son will belong to ten or twelve different societies, for the simple purpose of doing good. There is little pretense in action or talk, and all that one really needs for social success is freedom from affectation, fine manners, and integrity; or else intellect and conversational power. But what society shall I join?"

There is a new style of verse growing up whose disciples profess to write the "poetry of the future." Its form and manner of thought is after the modern French school, and is, of course, highly artistic. Its great claim is that it makes use of scientific discoveries and progress for the benefit of poetry. That is, when science tells of new worlds hanging in the remote distances of space, the poetry of the future immediately peoples them with very perfect, and perfectly unnatural inhabitants, in stanzas having three-syllabled rhymes, and uses them for a delectable garden in which to ramble and discover flowers that never knew rain or dust.

This may be a healthy poetic action, or it may not be so; that the future will

settle when it selects from the mass of verse now appearing such as is worthy of life, and relegates the remainder to the upper shelves of libraries and the cobweb-festooned seclusion of the garret. But the poetry of the future is not the thing with which I make quarrel, it is the expression by which it seeks to astonish us, the clashing- I was about calling it the torture of words through whose long drawn-out resonance it bears down on one, and at the same time storms the citadel of his mind in front, flank, and rear. This is not natural; neither are many of the subjects that this poetry of the future chooses natural. They are illusions, shining ones, I allow, but illusions still. Clothe them in all the many-syllabled rhymes you can, it is yet impossible to make them sing their way into the soul, to stay there among the memories of chosen songs and cherished things.

I have lately been experimenting in this poetry of the future, and have taken Jules Verne for my scientific authority. I think the poem contains a graphic description of a land that science alone could invent, and also full directions for a journey thereto. Here it is:

GHOUL-LAND.

IN the vast caves that lie deep far under us,
Countless leagues 'neath the surface of earth,
Great murmurs, volcanic and thunderous,
Through ages and ages have birth.

There ghouls chant fierce songs that sound dismally

In glooms that grow dense and expand, Where huge cliffs frown dark and abysmally On the shores of a dolorous land.

On those desolate shores, that rise ponderous
Over billowing sweeps of wild sea,
Tall pines, showing sombre and fronderous,
Writhe in gales that blow furious and free.
There the earth has a somnolent weariness,
And no grass and no flowers are seen ;
And gray rocks rise in cold, rigid dreariness,
With chill valleys running between.

There wide rivers flow through plains wonderful;
There forests of gigantic trees

Wake tones that sing choruses thunderful
To storm-anthems born on weird seas.
No ferns and no moss there grow slenderly,
No sweet echoes come from the hills;
No bird song, that floats away tenderly,
Through the cloud-haunted distances thrills.

Like ghosts of dead dreams floating over us, Grim shadows bend down from far skies;

Their phantom-like garments soon cover us,
And hide us from love's searching eyes.
And held in embraces so cumberous,
We drowse through the passing of years,
The spell of the land, deep and slumberous,
Freezing thought, hope, ambition, and tears.

Through space running off in gray density,
Shine redly the fires of the lost;
Worlds, grand in their sins' dread immensity,
By cyclonic storms wildly tost;
Stars, dying out slowly and mistfully,

Sweep on through satanical clouds,
Glowing there like sad eyes that look wistfully
From the silence of long, flowing shrouds.

Through those caves we go on to lands, luminous With lava floods surging along,

Passing titanic giants that gloom on us

From where shades of the old ages throng. There souls that wrecked loves still keep cherishing

Dwell with goblins that wander forlorn, Watching vague hopes continually perishing The same hour in which they are born.

Would you visit these caverns, then darefully,
Seek the pantry shut out from the flies,
And take from the shelves very carefully
The most indigestible pies;

Add with hands never known to choose charily
Some almonds and raisins to these,

And to start on the journey more airily,
Why, top off the whole with some cheese.

The well-fortified article in the Club for last September fails to convince me that prose cannot include poetry. What shall we say when a poem is translated into musical prose? If the writer of the above article is correct, no part of it can any longer be styled poetry. Alarming sacrifice! Here, for example, are two similar Oriental poems of a pessimistic and epicurean cast. An Englishman of some centuries ago translates one of them into the regularly paragraphed prose of our Bible; an Englishman of to-day translates the other into clever iambic quatrains which never miss a foot nor a rhyme. The latter, then, still retains its sacred character as poetry; while the former, although still decidedly superior, must be relegated to a lower place, and shorn of all its glory.

Let us join with the shade of Omar Khayyam in pæans of thanksgiving for the happy Briton who has been his salvation; but oh, fail not to temper in another world the scornful wrath of the author of Ecclesiastes. His work was poetry; now it is only prose like this:—

rate.

If the peculiar excellence of poetry were the retarding of emotion, the slowest modulations would always be the most effective. Coleridge in his earlier work, indeed, adhered closely as a rule to the staid feet of two syllables; but in his unequaled Cristabel and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner we find him continually breaking out into anapests and dactyls. He himself says that his lines will be found to vary in length from eight syllables to thirteen. There is only a little more irregularity and quite as true poetry in his avowedly prose fragment on the wanderings of Cain. I certainly fail to see how the airy lilt of the dactyl, ever dancing on tiptoe, can be said to retard anything.

No, the " modulation that distinguishes poetry is not a thing that can be labeled and stowed away on shelves as iambic, trochaic, or what not. It frequently adopts these rigid forms, but as frequently suits itself to the varying thought and feeling that gave it birth. It is no restraint, but an outgrowth. It is not the governor nor the escapement, but the wheels that turn as the steam or the mainspring drives, no check upon power, but the means whereby power normally makes itself felt.

As

the subtler forces of the outer world

manifest themselves through the rhythm of the waves, the subtler forces of the inner world manifest themselves through the rhythm of spoken or written words. "Daniel Webster's cadenced periods and the impassioned prose of De Quincey are not good examples. Doubtless passages embodying poetry could be quoted from either; but both of them share the very unpoetical faults of bombast, overloaded commonplace, and a palpable straining for effect. Their writings, generally speaking, are too artificial, too obviously rhetorical, to be poetry. The art beyond artifice is quite beyond them, too. Compare Webster's redundant utterances on the nature of eloquence, or the blood-and-thunder lake passages in the Flight of a Tartar Tribe, with the best writing of Hawthorne or Thackeray, and the difference becomes obvious at once.

I suppose the reason why most professed poets write but little in prose is because their temperament makes them choose that form of expression from which commonplace has been most nearly banished.

But Milton and Goethe, Victor Hugo and Thackeray, Holmes and Poe, have surely shown that success in any branch of verse does not imply an incapacity to succeed in prose also. They and many more have written poetry in both forms of expression. And I still maintain that all which they have written prose or is poetry, except when they lapse into unmusical language, or commonplace thought and feeling. Commonplace is probably, after all, our best opposite for poetry; and in that first comprehensive term I would include all manner of fustian and boredom.

verse