gency time, or from the caricatures of Gillray, Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank, from early Punch numbers of the forties, or from illustrations of the serials of the time. They take the pictures of humorists and caricaturists as if they were realist representations of current habits and dress. Caricatures - by their name-profess to be exaggeration of actual things and styles; they find their fun in the survival of oldfashioned habits. Thus the gay youth of to-day draw their ideas about their grandfathers and their grandmothers from 'Boz' and 'Phiz,' who were attributing to 1840 what belonged, if to any, to 1820. Now I remember the forties and the fifties perfectly. I lived in London and in the country in various home counties, in a busy professional and business society, and I never saw these queer things. The habits of the upper middle classes have not varied greatly in all this time. The material and moral changes have been immense; but social life has retained its external form. The dress of men, at least in ordinary life, has hardly changed in seventy years. Of course, the dress of women varies from season to season. But there never was any type of the Victorian lady. Perhaps, in 1972, young persons will imagine that ladies in the Court of King George V wore the costumes to be seen in the Punch cartoons and the milliners' models of to-day! As to styles of furniture, ornaments, house decoration, and the like, I can recall in some eighty years at least half a dozen - but none of them that which is conventionally known as 'Early Victorian.' The young Georgian attributes to Victorians what was partly true of pre-Victorian times. My witness is that down from the marriage of Queen Victoria and the Reform Age of the forties there came a world entirely different from that of the Regent and his crew but it had no definite continuous character of its own. NIGHT CROSSING BY WILFRID THORLEY [Saturday Review] THE gulfs are deep; the rollers heave; loud laugh the speeding shafts that cleave And out of chaos they would draw a tamer time, a calmer law, To keep the road and ford the stream and leave the rollers far behind. VIOLETS [Saturday Review] WHEN violets blow in woodland ways That turns the brown world green again; When violets spring 'neath changing skies, And hang their frail heads, newly born, The full-blown rose, the yellow corn. When violets glow by babbling streams When violets fade and pass away NATURE AND ART BY MARTIN ARMSTRONG [Form] But we, with the breath of dream Filling the pipe, and touching the stops with fingers of thought, Into fair and intricate tunes have caught God to be caged awhile among things that seem. 'VULTURE PLUMAGE' BY V. H. FRIEDLAENDER ['Model hats from Paris show an abundance of bird trimmings, sometimes whole birds, sometimes just the wings, and what is known as vulture plumage is promised a great vogue.'EVENING PAPER.] THE sheen, the bright bloom of the wing' The rapture, the grace Of flight and of song and of spring Dead to prink some girl's face. Fair women, white-handed, speak words With delicate breath: 'How pretty, how pretty are birds!' — And still woods echo death. Even so: this wild beauty that sings To the glory of God Shall become a cold huddle of wings, 'Vulture plumage?' A Daniel indeed SPRING BY M. M. JOHNSON [New Witness] SOFT falls the sunlight! Spring returns, THE thrush, to the high branch flown, Calls Bluetit now the trees among Pours through the yellow evening his happy heart To a god unsought, unknown. His thin, sweet song song: his thin, sweet Soft falls the sunlight, pale and clear, Now Spring awakens, Spring is here. ENGLISH OPINIONS OF AMERICAN POETRY It is a curious fact that four books on modern American poetry have been published in England within a few months, while only one book on modern English poetry has appeared during the same time and that merely the manifesto of an extremist. Does this mean that interest in American poetry is at the boiling point in the tight little island? One hardly gathers such an impression from the comment of the reviewers, in spite of the interest aroused by Mr. Vachel Lindsay's recent visit; but whatever the motives for their publication, the four books have at least stirred British critics to a number of comments that give Americans a peep at their own poets and their own critics in an interesting perspective. The American books are in themselves a sufficiently catholic assemblage the writings of two poets and two Harvard professors: Mr. Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry; Miss Amy Lowell's Tendencies in Modern American Poetry; Professor Bliss Perry's Study of Poetry; and Professor John L. Lowes's Convention and Revolt in Poetry. Comments on Mr. Untermeyer's anthology show that perhaps the most friendless poet abroad is Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson, whom most Americans would rank very high among the singers of our day; and certainly the most popular is Mr. Vachel Lindsay, whose immense, surging rhythms, and whose vigorous originality, bordering sometimes almost on the uncouth, are the last qualities in the world one would expect to appeal to such sedate gentry as the English critics. Mr. Robinson is much criticized. One of his few friends is Mr. John Drinkwater, who in a lecture before the Royal Society of Literature not long ago ranked him among the six greatest poets writing today and complained bitterly of the way in which England has neglected him, for not one of his books has so far appeared in an English edition. The Bookman also has a friendly word to say, and the Observer remarks that 'Robinson and Frost in a traditional, Vachel Lindsay in an original, way are by far the best of the poets here assembled.' But the other critics whet their knives and gleefully fall to. The Nation and the Athenæum calls Mr. Robinson duller than Wordsworth at his very dullest-a truly extraordinary verdict, which drew an indignant protest from Mr. John Gould Fletcher; and the Westminster Gazette follows up this singular line of thought by dubbing him 'an industrious and rather dull follower of Wordsworth.' The New Statesman, in reviewing Mr. Untermeyer's book, complains of 'the tedious solemnity of Markham and E. A. Robinson,' and returns to the charge in its review of Miss Lowell's book with this exceedingly faint praise: 'Even Mr. E. A. Robinson might be praised by a critic divinely charitable.' Do critical tendencies swing back and forth like a pendulum? In the early nineteenth century an innovator like Keats was ruthlessly criticized, though of course the 'snuffed out by an article' canard has long been exploded. Now, at the opening of the twentieth century, the critics fall ruthlessly upon Mr. Robinson, who is developing the older traditions very beautifully, but who can hardly pass for a radical or an innovator in these extremist days; and they join in a chorus of praise for Mr. Vachel Lindsay, who never in his life wrote a line that was not an innovation. It is difficult to account on any other This letter upset him completely. He hunted up Behnisch in order to pour his passion for Olga and everything Russian into the latter's commonplace bourgeois ears. Seated in a wine shop on Kurfürstendamm they drank to cordial friendship with the Slavs. Weisse accompanied Behnisch late that evening to the latter's residence, in a palatial apartment on one of the broad avenues of Wilmersdorf. 'Look! For Heaven's sake, what's going on?' It was after 3 A.M., but a great crowd had collected in front of the house. Before the door stood a huge truck with shabby leather seats and the insignia of the Berlin Police Department. Security Police in green uniforms and caps and gray cloaks stood on guard. A crowd of people was coming out of the house - gentlemen in good coats, and ladies in white wraps and furs. Most of them hung back; a few laughed and put a good face on the matter. 'Get in there, get in there, gentlemen and ladies! You will all have to go to police headquarters! The fare costs nothing!' said a big officer, standing at the truck. His companions grinned. Behnisch elbowed his way into the crowd to inquire of a policeman: 'What's the trouble?' 'We've just raided a night den here. Champagne at four hundred marks the bottle, and a lot of men and women playing the devil.' 'Where was it?' 'Oh, on the courtyard side, in the apartment of a Russian!' "The apartment of a Russian?' Weisse stammered weakly. He had an evil foreboding. 'Yes, the Russian is running the place; the others are taken merely as witnesses. The fellow proves to be an important Schieber. In the back room we found a lot of rugs and forbidden goods, with forged invoices and all the other apparatus.' Behnisch exclaimed with astonishment: 'Sasdenov! It must be! Can it be Sasdenov?' Weisse felt as though the ground were sinking under him. For just then there appeared in the doorway, accompanied by two policemen who were to escort him to Alexanderplatz, his wild revolutionist, his Genghis Khan; but this time in an elegant walking-coat, the proprietor of the disorderly house where champagne was sold at four hundred marks the bottle and there was illegal dancing. And the dancerhis head fairly swam, for she appeared in a long brown mantle. It was his Olga, the philosopher! That is why the two disappeared so promptly at a fixed hour every evening! As soon as the two got a glimpse of Max they burst out laughing. Nikolai shouted: 'Brother, I have been exterminating the bourgeoisie by robbing them of their wealth. Your eighteen hundred marks unfortunately came too late. I was going to get another lot of goods across the border. But it does n't matter! It all reaches the great coöperative treasury!' Olga threw a kiss to her admirer, and shouted: Auf Wiedersehen, golden dream! I'll call again when I'm free! You're a dear!' A gruff policeman promptly silenced them. 'Step lively there! None of your nonsense! Get in!' And the police truck with its passengers rumbled into the darkness. Behnisch said musingly: 'Better come up and have a cup of coffee. We need it.' Weisse nodded silently. In Behnisch's apartment he sank into an easychair without speaking a word. His money was gone, and so were his illusions. There were no longer such things as ideals. Genghis Khan was a Schieber. The inspiring girl who quoted Wundt's Psychology was a muscle-dancer. 'So you see,' said Behnisch, thoughtfully, as the coffee pot began to boil with a comfortable murmur, 'that's what you find among these foreign emigrants. Some resist temptation and for stick it out honestly, doing penance their own past faults and the faults of others. And many who were honest at home go to the devil here, because they must. We hit upon a couple of the latter. But these Russians are gifted they are a highly gifted race!' HOW THE OTHER HALF OF TOKYO LIVES [Japanese students have a slang term, Mokuchin Hotel, an absurd Chinafied pronunciation of kichin, meaning a cheap wooden building,—to designate a city lodging-house. This account of a night in such an institution appears in Jisseikatsu (Real Life) in the form of a letter from one student to another.] From the Japan Advertiser, March 12 I have been there at last. You will laugh at me for my eccentric adventure to a Mokuchin Hotel in these cold days. But I wanted a fresh experience to break the tedium. Anyhow, my visit was full of interest. You should have shared the adventure. K went with me, disguised as a laborer out of work. I dressed myself in my oldest and worst clothes. I darkened my face with toilet cream mixed with ashes. Thus our disguises were made and we went out. The landlady of my lodging-house was surprised to see me in such strange get-up and said humorously, 'Don't bring back bedbugs.' We got in a street car. Nobody took notice of us. I thought, Tokyo is Tokyo after all. Even the policeman was indifferent to the two poorly dressed laborers. It was rather disappointing to us. At the Oiwake stop we got out. Now we needed to screw up our courage before going further, so we looked for a low-class drinking-place. Shinjuku prostitute quarters were very desolate at this hour about eight in the evening-after the great fire. We walked through the place before we found a hotchpotch stall. Glasses of Osaka whiskey and bottles of sake were arrayed before us. 'Not so good. But I get 12 or 13 yen every evening these days,' the old man of the stall replied to my question as to how business went on with him. "Thirteen yen? That's excellent, is n't it?' 'But the profits are small. To sell much I must sell very cheap.' 'Is that so? By the way, we are out of a job at present and are thinking to start an eating-stall. Can you advise us?' "You have only to bring your things and ask the taskmaker. He will notify the police for you. You pay 2 sen for the street sweeper and 7 sen for a lamp of five candle power each night. That's all.' His advice to a novice was |