To color a photograph with paint is one thing. To reproduce color by photography is another. No one deems such processes as staining photographs by hand-the “art of chrystoleum" dear to lady-amateurs-to be worthy of serious attention. Several of the so-called processes of photography in colors are equally worthless as science or as art. From these to the three-block methods of color-printing is a long stride. Of the three-block methods there are many varieties, the fundamental idea of all being the same. Three separate negatives are taken through three screens of colored glass, to correspond to the three primary color sensations of the eye. Through a red glass screen those parts of the object photograph themselves most intensely which are radiating out red light. This yields a first negative corresponding to the red sensation. Through a green glass screen those parts which are emitting a green component produce their greatest effect in the second negative; while in the third negative the parts that radiate blue-violet light are brought out most strongly by being photographed through a blue-violet screen. Yellow light will affect the first and second of these; purple light the first and third; white light will affect all three. The three negatives taken thus from one colored subject will differ, therefore, in detail from one another. From them three blocks are prepared for the printing; and three kinds of printing-ink must be chosen of suitable tint and transparency. Since all printing processes consist in using pigment to darken the surface of the white paper on which

by which the negative was produced. The three colored impressions must, of course, be adjusted to perfect "register," exactly as in the more complicated older process of chromolithography. This kind of reproduction of color by photography is, in fact, a simplification of the older methods of color-printing, in substituting three accurate photographic process-blocks for the dozen or more hand-made blocks which formerly had to be employed. Of the success of these three-block methods from a commercial point of view there can be no question; but they scarcely fulfil the anticipation of photography in colors. The colored collotype photographs of Alpine scenery which have been miliar for some years in the printsellers' windows have a kindred origin; the color-blocks from which they are printed, though in some cases more than three in number, are simply photographic relief-blocks prepared by the collotype process for printing. They, too, fail to realize a true photography in colors.

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A more satisfactory solution of the problem of the photographic registration and reproduction of color is arforded by the chromoscope of Mr. Ives. Still working on the three-screen method of taking negatives, though with important improvements, Ives prepares three corresponding transparent positives, each colorless, which, illuminated separately by lights of three primary tints, red, green, and blueviolet, are then optically recombined in the instrument to form a single colored picture. Ives's success in this optical combination has been nothing short of marvellous. But unless the instrument, the chromoscope, is available to view the photographs, they convey no sense of color. Ives has also produced transparent color-pictures by printing from the three negatives three separate prints in the three tints upon clear gelatine films, which are then superposed one over the other. The extreme nicety required to produce exact super

ment of its own tint out of a chemical precipitation of material taking place under its influence. Until, however, M. Chassagne is in a position to reveal the nature of the secret solution with which he prepares his photographic plates, all speculation must be more or less wide of the mark. For the present, disappointing as his colored photographs are, they mark the beginning of a new step in the photographic art, provided always that the basis of the process is, as seems to be the case, a new step in science.

SILVANUS THOMPSON.

From The Spectator.

THE DIFFICULTIES OF RELIGIOUS POETRY. The purpose of all poetry is to illu minate our experience of the world by means of passion and imaginative thought. Passion is necessary, because it is only when the mind is at white heat under the influence of some powerful emotion that its contents become so thoroughly fused as to flow readily into a new mould. By calling this new mould of thought imaginative, it is meant that the elements of experience which move the poet, and about which he desires to move us, are brought into sudden vividness through association with some other experience whose value is clearly known. Thus when the Psalmist says, "My days are gone by like a shadow, and I am withered like grass," there rises before the mind the picture of some hot Eastern landscape; and as we look at the grass all dry in the sun's glare, there passes over it the shadow of a bird's wing. And by means of that picture, in which the poet saw an image of the transitoriness of human life, his emotion becomes ours. Now this fine verse from the 102nd Psalm, though it occurs in a religious poem, is not itself religious poetry; it is a poetical illumination of a fact of human life, its shortness, which every one must recognize to be a fact,

most keenly if he has none. Poetry is not religious unless it recognizes the religious interpretation of the world, and this constitutes its chief difficulty. For there is an alternative risk, either that the religious poet will go straight to the facts that have roused his emotion, and represent them apart from their Christian interpretation, or that the work of reflection involved in attending to this will cool his imagination. There is a danger that his Christianity will get the better of his poetry, or his poetry of his Christianity.

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The most successful religious poetry, because the least troubled by this difficulty, is lyrical expression of the soul's delight in God, and in the world of nature regarded as His handiwork. the first case, the feelings of admiration, love, hope, and worship that the poet must express will be so simple and direct that there is small chance of collision between his instinctive religious emotions, which are to a certain extent Christianized, and his Christian creed; we find it possible to use to-day, with not so very much mental reservation and correction, the religious lyrics of the Jews, and with more reservation, those of other peoples. And in regard to nature the Christian creed is so broad that provided the beauty of nature be ascribed to God, the Christian can sympathize both with Cowper, who lays the greater stress on God's transcendence, and with Wordsworth, who lays the greater stress on his immanence. When religious lyrics fail, it is usually because emotion has been considered a sufficient equipment for the sacred poet without thought and imagination. This is the common fault of hymns. The experience they represent has been fresh felt in passion, but not fresh dipped in thought. A man of genius differs from the rest of us chiefly in this, that the simplest thing he studies, by the branches it puts out, the ties it reveals to so many things else, is a perpetual fount of interest, and so the tritest facts of nature and grace never cease to be a revelation.

But the "new song" which the Chris

tian poet has to sing must be sung not only before "the Throne" and "the Living Creatures," but also before "the Elders:" that is to say, it must interpret anew to the Church the Christian interpretation of man's life; and it is here that the chief difficulty of religious poetry shows itself. The cause of the difficulty lies in the fact that "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual;" and this is true in more ways than one. The spiritual interpretation of the world does not lie on the surface, and there is a natural explanation which is always ready to present itself. Take for an example the phenomenon of death. When the poet is deeply stirred by this fact of death, when his passion is liberated and the world shaken to and fro in his imagination, it is almost necessarily the first natural view of death that possesses him. If he is considering the thought of death abstractly, or looking forward to it as Browning does in "Prospice," or reflecting upon it long afterwards as Tennyson in the "In Memoriam," then he will remember he is a Christian; but at the moment when the shock comes it is not the reflective mind that is at work, it is the imagination stirred by passion; the phenomenon of death lies once more in its naked awfulness before the poet as freshly as the world lay before Adam, compelling him to utter the dread name, and shudderingly he names it. It is pure loss; the flower is shattered, the wine is spilt; "the silver cord is loosed, the golden bowl is broken, the pitcher broken at the fountain, the wheel broken at the cistern." Look at this verse wrung from the greatest poet of our own day by the death of his friend:

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O sea!

has heard and understood; and his song, a song of natural and inevitable fate, a song that might have come from Mimnermus, will echo in the hearts of Englishmen when the "In Memoriam" lies as dusty on the booksellers' shelves as the "Essay on Man" does to-day. Or take an even more pointed instance from the same poet; read the exquisite first four stanzas of "The Deserted House:"

Life and thought have gone away

Side by side

Leaving doors and windows wide;

and then read the intc lerable appendix, added to Christianize it,-lines that have neither passion, nor thought, nor melody, nor rhythm. There is a second sense, too, in which religious poetry is hampered by the precedence of the natural over the spiritual. The heyday of the blood in which the passion is strongest and the imagination most active is often a day of revolt against tradition, and especially against that traditional interpretation of the deepest facts of life which we call Christianity. We need only point to Shelley. That Shelley ranked himself as a servant of the truth, and thought he lived at least as resolutely as most people by the highest ideal he knew, but few perhaps would dispute. But the fact remains that he is not a Christian poet, but, on the contrary, that he branded as "impious," and stamped in the dust with all the passion of his poet's ture, "the name that is above every name." And even when there is no actual revolt against Christianity, it would seem true that, while the main effort of Christianity is to discover “a soul of goodness" in the world's evil, it is the sombre aspects of life which appeal most keenly to the poetical sensibility. When Shakespeare tells us that young gentlemen in his day "would be

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The sea's voice breaking on its "cold, grey stones" has sung a song of natural and inevitable fate; and the poet

is passing a criticism upon the minor poetry of all time; but even greater poets have sometimes felt themselves called to be a nerve over which should creep "the else unfelt oppressions of