"Now, look here, my good chap," he said; "you had better listen to me. I haven't the least wish to be meddlesome, but I think you would make a very good secretary, and I'm quite certain that you ought to marry Miss Spencer without loss of time. Are you aware, my dear fellow," he went on, "that that child is living in an attic, chiefly on-on bananas? That she doesn't have a fire, because she wants to be economical; that she nearly dies of fright before she crosses a street? I watched her from my window, and observed that she generally stopped short almost under the horses' feet; that she-well, think of what she is, and ask yourself if she is fit to be alone in London?"

Robert turned pale, and looked extremely serious. Denzil respected the struggle which was evidently going on in his mind.

"I can only see this way out of the difficulty," he went on. "I have tried to find employment for her. I even thought that her engagement here, temporary though it is, might be a useful training for her, but—”

"I'm sorry you have found her so unsatisfactory," said the young man in a wounded tone.

Denzil took a turn about the room, paused, laughed, and finally said, with a humorous look: "Well, you know-as a matter of fact, she can't spell!"

"I know she can't," said the lover; and he, too, laughed somewhat ruefully, but with so kindly and tender a look in his eyes that Denzil's heart went out to him.

"You may trust me, Mr. Burton," he said earnestly. "I am not at all a Quixotic person, but I take a very great interest in Miss Spencer; and, honestly, I don't know what else is to be done. Now, I rather fancy that, were it not for certain honorable scruples, you would have no objection to marrying her out of hand?"

"No objection at all," said Robert, with a smile quite as tender as the former one, and not in the least rueful. "Quite the contrary. I-it seems like a dream."

Denzil looked at him half sadly.

Yes, no wonder the good fellow found it hard to realize that the beloved little bride, whom he hoped to make his own only after years of labor, was actually thrust into his arms. Graham extended his hand frankly:

"Come," he said, "you may trust me. Don't be afraid that the obligation will be too great. You have plenty of ability, and I shall make you very useful to me. In fact," he went on, "you will confer as great a benefit as you receive."

"I cannot admit that," said Robert; but he put his hand fearlessly into the philanthropist's. "I-I don't know how to thank you!"

Denzil shook his hand warmly, and looked at him with genuine approval. Not one man in a thousand, he said to himself, could reconcile gratitude with self-respect. This man had sufficient greatness of soul not only to accept a benefit but not to be ashamed of accepting it.

A few minutes later Robert went his way, walking upon air, in a state of rapture only equalled by his bewilderment; and Graham Denzil was left alone to congratulate himself on the success of his enterprise.

All his life long he had been considered an eminently wise and judicious person, one whose dealings with his fellow creatures, humane and generous though they might be, were nevertheless dictated by sound practical common sense. Yet to-day he had done what the world would call an extremely foolish thing: he had set his customary rules of conduct at defiance, and become, for the nonce, undeniably Quixotic. He had taken a perfectly

mental contemplation of the bliss of these two unimportant units.

Nevertheless, when his eyes fell upon the writing-table at which Lucy generally sat, the chair with the hassock in front of it, because those ridiculous little feet of hers were such a long way from the ground; the blottingpaper, ornamented with various scrawls by means of which his late secretary had made trial trips, as it were, when any particularly difficult word was in question; the pen-handle nibbled at the end-he heaved a little sigh.

"After all," he said, "I believe I shall miss her!"

M. E. Francis.

Among the French-writing Belgian poets, Maeterlinck and Verhaeren stand first. The former earned success and fame in his first manner, and moreover, with "The Life of the Bee," and his most recent dramas, has given us proof of his power of development. It has been far more difficult for Verhaeren, whose talent in the main is purely lyrical, and appeals to fewer, and whose productions are untranslatable, to force his way to the front; however, he is now recognized as Belgium's chief French lyrist and as one of the best poets in the Frenchspeaking world. But, should one wish to interest other countries in him, it is to his dramas that one must draw attention.

He was born in 1855 at the village of St. Amand, near Antwerp, and he passed his childhood in the country, on the banks of the Scheldt, among the fertile Flemish meadow lands, whence he absorbed the love of the country that permeates his poetry. His

first book of poems, "Les Flamandes," depicted exuberant, joyous and substantial Flanders, with her farmsteads, public-houses and fairs; the women have the same luxuriant health as Rubens and Jordaens impart to them. As a pendant to this Flanders, in "Les Moines" he depicts pious Flanders, the Flanders of the Blessed Virgin, whose praises are sung by those who have renounced the world, the life of the cell, monastic dreams, the quiet life by rule that is passed in prayer, divine service and ecclesiastical pageants; the Flanders that Memling recorded for posterity.

In his next books of poems, he gives free play to his imaginative power and perception; his mode of feeling brings him more and more under the spell of the tragical; his dream of happiness seems ended; even the visions that reveal themselves to him are often of the character of frightful phantoms. In one of these collections, "Les apparus dans mes chemins," the wide,

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mournful plain is peop

after poem, with grim s man of the horizon, who is an himself and seeks his path afar; weary man, who drags heavily the weight of the dead centuries and curses his lot; the man of science, whose keen eye has sought, and sought vainly; the man of the great nothingness, the king of decay, who proclaims with a mocking laugh the decay in which the universe will end;-until St. George, in shining armor, beneath a golden rainbow, descends from heaven on his foaming horse, and clears the place of the ugly visions. In another wholly symbolical collection of poems, "Les Villages illusoires," he draws, in tempest, rain and snow, none but figures he has known as a child in Flanders, transforming them, by dint of his powerful imagination, into great allegorical types. There is the ferryman who is fighting his way against the storm, to reach her who has called him. But the stream is dangerous; one oar snaps; the rudder snaps; the second oar snaps; and the voice is calling. In the churchyard the gravedigger has been digging graves; white coffins come down the avenues for him to lay in their graves, the white coffins of his agonies and memories; and red coffins are borne to him along the pathways, those wherein his heroic courage of bygone days, his shattered courage and his crimes, are buried. In the moonlight, by the riverside, the fishermen watch their black nets, sunk in the ooze: and they take no other haul than their misery, their many illnesses, and stranded remains thrown up in plenty of their wrecked hopes and disappointed expectations.

In his drama, "Le Cloître" (1900), he reverts to his early theme, monastic life, but here it is interpreted in another spirit. The strongest and wildest passion finds expression in this piece, and the most varied types of monks are represented with masterly firmness and assurance. There is something grand about the theme. We perceive from the first, in the monastery into which we are introduced, only the varied ambitions, piety, mutual ill-will and rivalry of the monks. We see the prudent and quite ecclesiastical prior singling out and designating as his successor a monk of noble birth, a quondam duke, Dom Balthazar; see the latter opposed by Thomas, who aspires to the dignity of prior himself, and beloved by young Dom Marc, a monk as angelically sweet as the monks in the paintings of Fiesole. We learn by degrees that Dom Balthazar has murdered his own father, not because he had injured him (for he was an upright man), but because one day he had censured his son for his wicked life. He had taken refuge in the monastery to escape punishment. But this does not dismay the prior in the least; he considers Dom Balthazar's repentance all the finer when his guilt has been so great, and thinks him the more worthy to adorn the position of prior after him because his conduct as a friar is so purely Christian and edifying.

Though Verhaeren's verse, in his first books, still exhibits the strict regularity of rhythm and rhyme of earlier French poetry, he has by degrees thrown off every obligation of metre, frequently making use of similar sounds instead

Even when the impression of Balthazar's crime is deepened by our learning

unkhe has, in cold blood, allowed an innocent vagrant, who was suspected of the murder, to be executed, the prior does not modify his attitude towards the aristocratic monk, nor consider his monastic life less edifying. When another brother, in his horror, thinks of reporting Dom Balthazar to the temporal authorities, even Thomas, the criminal's opponent, shrinks from such a reprehensible action, which would give the outside world insight into the secrets of the cloister. But Balthazar's own peace of mind becomes shaken by degrees; he can bear his secret himself on longer, and one day, when the church is filled to overflowing, he proclaims his crime in all its enormity, in the most powerful expressions language is capable of, to the assembled congregation. The monks seek in vain to interrupt him, and when he has concluded his wild confession the prior condemns him and casts him out with a passion that, for the sake of the Church's honor, knows no pity. The young and pious Dom Marc, alone, still prays for the erring one who is to die upon the scaffold.

The concluding acts are followed up with a knowledge of the human heart and a vigor of style that leave nothing to be desired.

Between 1893 and 1898 Emile Verhaeren wrote a trilogy, the subject of which was one that touched him, a child of the country, closely, and that he had for a long time taken very much to heart, namely, the fatal absorption of the inhabitants of the country by the town, which, in his native land, had gradually caused the country to grow desolate and the villages deserted. The fact that he himself left the country for Brussels and of late years has resided in Paris, is a singular illustration of his theme.

The last link in his trilogy, the drama called "The Dawn" (Les Aubes), is perhaps the most remarkable and

important work that he has yet produced. (The subject bears some slight resemblance to Edvard Söderberg's "A Riot.")

The scene of action is outside the domain of historical reality, as is always the case in Verhaeren's writings. There is a war; a hostile army approaches the huge town of Oppidomagne, driving the fugitives from the burning villages before it towards the capital. We make acquaintance with various sections of the population, the swarm of beggars and the fugitive, embittered peasants. We are prepared for the coming of a man whom everyone is thinking of and talking about, Jacques Hérénien, the great popular tribune, who wishes to bring the body of his father, an old peasant, to the cemetery in the town. He comes, and we get some impression of the enormous esteem in which he is held.

The suggestion for the piece is taken from the siege of Paris in 1870-1871. Inside the town itself, the proletariat have withdrawn to a high-lying churchyard, where they take up a threatening attitude towards the regency, a patrician government who have reduced them to the last extremities through their selfishness and harshness. Jacques Hérénien is the people's man and the coming man, and in writings that are read even in foreign lands has expressed ideas about the rights of the oppressed and the atrocity of war, which have attracted such attention that he has disciples even in the ranks of the hostile army.

We see the government vainly striving to win him over, see them cheat him, then again strive to make use of him with the crowd by making liberal promises which are intended to ward off the threatened danger; we see him surrounded by trust and envy and hate, and we observe how he rises to the height of his power, secures internal reace in the capital, and finally, the re

The

sult of a venturesome deed, to which he is incited by his own genius, closes with an offer from the enemy. hostile army is as tired of the war as the besieged town itself, and through one of the enemy's chiefs who has read Hérénien's books and feels that he is a disciple of his, an arrangement is entered into by which the war is terminated by a peaceful procession of the besieging army into the capital. The ideals of popular government and universal peace seem assured, when the great tribune is hit by the last bullets shot at him by the soldiers of the regency, under the orders of the spiteful men of the old régime. He dies, but his wife lifts up his little son over the people's heads, and they hail in him the dawn of a new era.

Years after reading this play for the first time, a recollection of something striking remains, but, singularly enough, you forget the particulars. You retain the memory of Hérénien's personality in indistinct outline, and without any definite impression of his characteristics. This may certainly be laid partially to Verhaeren's charge.

Everything here stands and falls with the personality of the tribune and the impression of greatness he is able to impart. Verhaeren found himself face to face with the problem ever present in poetry: How is the impression of greatness to be produced? It is done most simply and easily through the importance attributed by others to an individual, their respectful, enthusiastic and affectionate behavior towards him, or, on the other hand, their envy, hatred and malice; in the second place, through their blunt declarations of his worth. Then, finally-and this is of course the main thing-by his own words and actions. Now Hérénien The Contemporary Review.

speaks in a manly and enthusiastic style; we perceive his power over other men's minds; everything he says has a lyrically rhetorical swing; but the stamp of greatness is undeniably somewhat effaced. Voltaire, who had disciples in the armies of France's enemies, was very much more simple. Frederick II. of Prussia, who had admirers in the armies of his enemies, was very much more blunt. Even Gambetta, whose influence was greatest as an orator, was not so serious all the time.

One feels in this drama that Verhaeren has fought for political, no less than for artistic, freedom; in 1892 he was working with Eekhoud and Vandervelde in Brussels for the development of the House of Representatives, he established an Art Department, and went in eagerly for the cause of popular education. For him, as for many another man of the day, the great man is he who can make the idea of peace an established fact. The difficulty of utilizing the hero of the peace drama dramatically, however, lies in the difficulty of individualizing that idea. There has only been one man in our own day who has shown genius and new tactics in this direction, Jean de Bloch the Pole, who attempted to combat war financially; but his originality was not of the sort adapted to the character of the popular tribune or a hero of tragedy. Nevertheless it was in the elaboration of the tribune's personality that Verhaeren should have fought his chief battle. But, being in his heart of hearts a lyrist, he did not take sufficient pains over it, and although "Les Aubes" is certainly one of the most remarkable dramatic works of our day, it has not become the redeeming word that a masterpiece is. George Brandes.