raising the old and stupid cry that with such and such a man poetry died and that in such a year English lyricism ceased to exist, the artist, who with the splendid confidence of genius closes his ears and creates. poetry, and lyric poetry of the highest order, is admirable. Swinburne alone of all the poets left us possessed with that fiery love of song and that fierce sense of its complete mastery and holiness which typifies the classical singers. He can cry in "Thalassius"

Thou hast set thine heart to sing and sold

Life and life's love for song. God's living gold;
Thou hast given thy flower and fire of youth

To feed men's hearts with visions truer than truth.

He has carried on the light which Shelley left us, through the darkness of a transition period, nor has he stopped there.

He, too, has caught a glimpse of the new day. After the intense complexities and super-subtleties of the "fin de siècle," he points to the art of the fresh century which is to be primal and profound, dealing with the great passions and relations of men and nature, in the spirit and the body. Nor is the body to be considered base but both are to go together as the living expression of the universe. With Swinburne this primality has already begun and it is as if he were weary of the infinite complexity and strife of his time, in the prophetic lines

I will go back to the great, sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea.

The astounding primality of "The Masque of Queen Bersabe," though mixed with much that is decadent and contemporary is prophetic in its originality. Such lines as

My large lips have the old thirst of earth,

Mine arms the might of the old sea's girth —

are merely signs of the intense primality at work on his conceptions. If we examine Swinburne's philosophy we again find the same powerful influences of his day, out of which, rather than for which he is striving. The last years were in the world of art, indeed a twilight of the gods and a breaking down of spirit and letter because the letter

was false. Such artists as Swinburne rankled against the old and distorted images, grown respectable through the toleration of time; and yet the longing for something beyond the hard visible bound, which is felt by the artist more keenly perhaps than any other, filled them with bitterness against the very source of things. The great spirit of an ideal, however, can, at worst, but hide its face behind a cloud; driven from one pinnacle it seeks another and the mind must follow it in its progress. It is a long way from the hopeless cry

All we are against thee, against thee, O God most high

from the negative and futile lines,

Him would I smite, him reach, him desecrate,
Pierce the cold lips of God with human breath
And mix his immortality with death.

to the positive and confident solution

Glory to man in the highest, for man is the master of things.

It is not man as an individual, a divided portion, but "man in the highest," all the noblest strivings of all men in common, the community, that is here exalted to a place of mastery. And this portion of Swinburne's philosophy again, seems to have caught the reflection of the new dawn, when society shall have advanced at least one step toward a communistic unity and when art shall be more a social service, an ecstasy of the individual, striving toward the completeness of all men, than a pure self-delight, or a revelling in its own orbit of emotion. When man shall search rather in himself and the great natural race of man for the truths of the world than in the stars or any place beyond them.

Of Swinburne's technical artistic relation to the immediate past and future, it is unnecessary to speak. We know how he has gathered together and assimilated all the artistry of those who have gone before him and produced therefrom something which is beautiful and distinctly his own. As a merely technical artist he is indisputably among the very greatest, and has done more for the form of our English poetry than, perhaps, any other one man. The conception of poetry as

a musical rather than a plastic art had its origin with him, and while it is true that any man, possessed of a great idea, is apt to carry it too far-and Swinburne's proves his own artistic limits and defects inasmuch as the use of his medium becomes coarse and exaggerated-yet it is much to be able to say that, from this day on, no poet may write without being on his technical side, to a certain degree affected by him. But this is not Swinburne's greatest gift. More than any other, he has borne the light from one day to another, through the despair of a long night. Burdened with its weariness, he has also been gloriously sensible to the coming dawn. And he is right. If we listen to the thinkers of our own day and observe ourselves, we must feel that an enormous though slow change has been taking place in all phases of life. Especially in society a new ethical ideal, regarding the aims and possibilities of the community has arisen, and we are prepared to advance a step from the economic waste and selfishness of pure individualism to some form of perfected communistic life-just what, we cannot say. This influence extends to even the most retarded peoples and the imminent Russian revolution-should it burst-will have as tremendous an effect upon the thought of the world as the French Revolution had, in earlier years. Swinburne seems to have struck the keynote of the new thought in his negation of the individual search for an abstract and remote ideal and in his exaltation of the great truths, apprehended by the human soul, and found in the combined souls of all men, passionate and aspiring.

We are on the verge of a great new era of thought and beauty. This he has felt and prophesied. He, in an age of barrenness and despair, has not let die the hope handed down to us from Shelley, nor ceased his confident belief in the great powers of life and the coming light, until now we stand under the very flush of the new day. Critics protested that lyric genius was dead but Swinburne expressed himself in these lines from his "Anactoria" when he cried,

Even I

Yea, though thou diest I say I shall not die.

John Hall Wheelock.

PAOLO AND PARIS.

Out of the dark, on wings of flame,
Fearless and calm to our world we came,
And the Spinning Ones led us on to seek

Through the world till we met yet dared not speak,
And the young gods smiled from their temples blue,
As we laughed and played when the world was new.
Man and maid on the youthful earth,

With memories dim of some long-past birth,

We sought through the world and cared not for men,
But spoke with our eyes and were young again,
And the young gods laughed, as lip to lip,
We fled through the night in the leaping ship.

Beautiful still, when the world was old,
Cheek to cheek in the springtime's gold,

As we sighed o'er the loves of queen and knight,

A shadow darkened our startled sight,

And the old gods wept as we fell and died,

At the slayer's feet-unsatisfied.

On through the dark since time was made,
We have lived and died and loved and prayed,
And borne by God's wrath in the whirling mist,
Soul with soul we have met and kissed,
But the old Poet sighed in the vales of death,
As we passed on the wailing tempest's breath.

Robert Emmons Rogers.

THE TRAVEL PAPERS OF ARMINIUS.

Foreword.

I have before me a pile of papers that have come to me during the past months from many different corners of the Old World. The envelopes in which they travelled their four or five or six thousand miles lie beside them, some still bulging as if in pride at the heavy burden they have borne so long a way, others flat and insignificant, revealing the fact that they have been entrusted with but a sheet or two, and those of not too much importance. The postmarks are varied and strange and in part puzzle even the proverbial editorial omniscience. But I am not reproaching myself greatly because I have never heard of Baliana and Medineh-el-Fayoum. It is good to be ignorant occasionally these days. The Sunday papers are teaching so much concerning radium and tuberculosis and the flora and fauna at the South Pole that sound old-fashioned ignorance (such as does not even profess a certain insight into these mysteries) is becoming as great a distinction as a bit of education was in the days of W. Shakspere and his excellent contemporary, Sir Francis.

These papers, of the manner of whose advent, good reader, I have informed you above, contain in the words of their author himself, my good friend Arminius, "the wretchedly sentimental record of the journey of an incorrigible sentimentalist"; in which statement, my readers will immediately recognize a flavor of the spirit of the inimitable Mr. Yorick whom my friend has been perusing much of late, and whom I think he seeks to follow more than seems to me right and justifiable. However, this is no place to discuss either the pretensions or the morality of my friend Arminius. Concerning his sentimentalities, however, I feel that a few words of explanation are necessary. As his name suggests-everyone will immediately recognize it as that of the Teutonic