some detail the early art of Egypt, Assyria, Chaldæa, Phoenicia, with a view to determining the ideals and the first movements of early civilization; for throughout the volume Mr. Conway regards art as a function of social and religious history. The suggestions of the sketch are of most service to those who have acquired unrelated knowledge in the specific directions followed by the author.

It is

Education. The Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1888-89 (Government Printing Office, Washington) is contained in two octavo volumes. for the most part a mass of classified statistics, but the commissioner has taken advantage of the special reports to present some of the results in more general terms. What he has to say of the relations of the schools to the colleges is guarded and judicious. His comments on the development of the university are much to the point. — In Heath's Modern Language Series, Victor Hugo's Hernani is edited by John E. Matzke. The introduction sketches rapidly the French theatre of the eighteenth century and the Romantic drama, of which Hugo is the great master, the versification, the story of Hernani, and the occasion of its first representation, when it caused such a commotion among the Classicists. -Burke's Speeches on the American War, and Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, with Introduction and Notes by A. J. George. (Heath.) A convenient textbook. Mr. George's work is confined to excerpts from writers on Burke, suggestions as to study, and brief

notes.

Sociology. Darkness and Daylight, or Lights and Shadows of New York Life, by Mrs. Helen Campbell. (A. D. Worthington & Co., Hartford, Conn.) Mrs. Campbell contributes the greater part of the material in this book, but there are also two considerable sections by Colonel T. W. Knox and Inspector Byrnes. The general scheme is to lay bare the concealed side of city life, and that aspect of crime and poverty which is not obvious to the casual observer. The lights in the picture are chiefly the efforts made for regeneration by persons. and organizations, though there is comparatively slight reference to the noble work done specifically by the churches. The shades, however, form the principal elements in the picture of city life, and a forlorn, miserable procession of rogues and wretches passes before the eye of the read

er.

The writers have used excellent judgment in keeping clear of the sensational, and especially in the treatment of sensual vice. The book ought to do something toward informing country people of the perils of the darker side of city life. It is such a survey as is likely to be read, for it is not encumbered with statistics, and is plentifully lightened by anecdote. The book is very abundantly illustrated, and the reader remarks how inevitably art, even when photographic, manages to give a picturesque quality to the most squalid conditions, except as connected with human faces. Streets, buildings, ruins in the low quarters, all have a touch of interest and attractiveness; the ruined faces of men and women alone are unrelieved by art.

An Impression of Walt Whitman.

ONE of the most familiar of figures in print and picture, every

where well known or easily taken for granted, Walt Whitman was also personally most accessible; it was part of his conception of the high office of poet to be so; and there are many among us who have seen and spoken with him, many who have had far greater opportunities than I of knowing and estimating him. In writing these lines to the Club, I am conscious of

having little in the way of fact or criticism to add to this knowledge, and no claim either of literary authority or of personal intimacy to pronounce his éloge. I saw him but twice or thrice; on one occasion spending a few hours in his company, in a conversation that was impressive and memorable to me. But alas for the lacunes of memory! I made no record of the talk, and much that he said has gone from me. The impression remains. Perhaps an at

tempt to define it may fit in with some twilight talk of the dead poet; perhaps I may slip my pebble between the larger stones of his cairn.

It was a warm Sunday noon, late in the summer of 1883, when two of us went to dine at a suburban house where Walt Whitman was a frequent guest, and was then staying for a few days. Warmth and sunshine were outside, shadow and coolness within, with perfect Sabbath quiet. The table was set for four, and I, the youngest of the party and the sole representative of my sex, had for my vis-à-vis the ample figure of the poet clad in light gray linen, his wide rolling shirt collar and long white hair and beard framing the massive, kindly face. He gave the keynote of the conversation, bearing his full share therein, but never monopolizing it; talking with perfect courteousness, and with a simplicity and sincerity which set his listeners at ease, and made sincerity easy, and in fact the only attitude. possible in the reply. What struck me, in his conversation, was first his readiness to talk and to hear of everything, his wide curiosity and sympathy; and next, the flavor of it, the unity, which seemed to come, not from a stock of opinions, but out of a nature harmoniously adjusted to limitations which fitted it loosely and easily, as the ample linen suit fitted his large frame.

The conversation at first drifted back to war times, Whitman telling of some hospital experiences and interviews with Lincoln; the other gentlemen adding bits of reminiscence, and discussing with him various incidents and accompaniments of the struggle. We talked, too, of the state of affairs in the South, and its regrettable but ever - lessening separation from the interests and life of the rest of the country. Of course we soon got upon the open-sea topic of human life, the puzzle and mystery of it, the question what should be made of it. The poet maintained that the physical life was nowadays too much neglected; that between an attention to material and extraneous interests, on the one hand, and a conventional exaltation of the mental aspects, on the other, we were driving the physical to the wall; as if life, this wonderful, mysterious life, were not primarily a physical phenomenon. To my objection that a perfect physical life was denied to many, and that nature seemed to bring about a sort of

balance or provide a compensation in the fact that many persons, physically defective or suffering, had developed deep mental or spiritual insight, gaining through their very loss, he replied: "Yes, that is beautiful, but it is only compensation for loss; and after all, is anything so beautiful as a whole, complete life, lived after natural laws, and preserving into old age its health and its power?" He went on to speak of the comparative rarity of a healthful, serene old age, such as ought to be the crown of every life, and asked, "How many examples do we see of it?" I mentioned a name that had more than once come to my mind, as we talked, Victor Hugo. He said, "His is a fine old age," but spoke with little warmth, and added that it was a pity Victor Hugo was not truer and less bombastic.

The conversation turned on poetry. Walt Whitman said: "I envy Homer. I envy him that first strong impression of things. To him it was a new heaven and a new earth. Every poet since Homer has been at a disadvantage, has had to see and feel and describe what had all been seen and felt and described before." Every poet, he went on to say, had to go back as nearly as possible to that position, to see things at first hand; that his greatness as a poet depended on his power of thus going back to the great elements of life, of seeing the world as a new world, and recreating it in words that were true, fresh, and direct. He spoke of Wordsworth as a poet who had dealt too much with the secondary aspects, with nature as viewed from the standpoint of a complicated human experience, and said,

Bryant is one of my favorites ;" adding that Bryant was never great, and was often monotonous, but that his way of looking at nature was simple and healthful, and more direct than Wordsworth's. I could not help thinking that his application of the principle was defective in that the simplicity he cited was perhaps more or less of an imitative character, while the poet to whom he referred as subtle had struck deeper, through whatever indirection, to the heart of things. He spoke of the pleasure of finding in Bryant allusions to those common objects of American landscape which we know and love.

After dinner I was alone with Walt Whitman for a few moments on the piazza.

He began to explain to me, kindly and carefully, as if fearful lest they should have been misunderstood, his remarks on the relation of the physical and mental life; saying in substance that the life of the soul was the highest end, but that to that end the most perfect equilibrium was essential, the physical having its great part in the development of the ideal. There had been no misunderstanding of his words on my part, and no contradiction, save of the accidental kind which occurs in the movement of conversation when we bring in facts or suggestions without measuring exactly their relation to what has preceded. It was not a point to contradict. If the physical is not with us in our higher aims, it is fearfully against us.

A drive was proposed for the late afternoon, and in the mean time Walt Whitman disappeared for an hour to take a nap. We sat on the piazza till he joined us again, when he recurred to some talk that we had had at dinner, apropos of optimism and pessimism. He had affirmed the former creed, and I had protested against too entire an optimism, because of the possibility it left open of sliding over things too easily, of ignoring the depths of human experience. He now remarked, in his wise, tranquil manner, "Optimism with a touch of pessimism, that is the right creed." And is not that the optimism of Leaves of Grass, which makes its affirmation so strongly and ardently, without neglecting to take account of the contradictions and negations?

"Roaming in thought over the Universe,

I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality,

And the vast all that is called Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead."

Our host asked the poet to read to us before we took our drive, and he consented. We hoped for something of his own, but he suggested Bryant, wishing to show us what he liked in him, and read Thanatopsis. To a seasoned Wordsworthian Thanatopsis is an echo, but it is a stately, pleasing poem for all that, dealing with things that are true and dear to us, and, read as it was read on that quiet Sunday afternoon, it was impressive and beautiful. While the reading was going on we heard at intervals a distant thud, the firing of a gun. Our host said, "It is a soldier's funeral." Whit

man paused, sat silent a moment, then resumed the solemn lines on death.

We had a charming drive about the country, the poet now and then waving his hand, with a smile, to little children by the roadside; enjoying everything, interested in the crops growing or gathered, and admiring particularly some high stone walls built around large properties, for their evident strength, the gray color of the stone, and their honest workmanship. When we bade farewell to our host and Walt Whitman, who left us at our own door, the latter insisted upon alighting, though he was lame from paralysis, and handing me out. He said to us, "It has been a pleasant day, has it not?" My companion assented. I added, with enthusiasm, "It has been a perfectly happy day to me, Mr. Whitman.” His face lit up cordially, and he said, "Has it so? I am glad. If there had been anything the matter with it before, that would have made it all right."

The next time I saw him, passing him one day in the street, as he sat in a carriage beside the curbstone, he returned my salutation evidently without recognizing me, but with his hearty manner, as of one glad to salute any fragment of humanity. Later I heard him read, before a large assembly, his poem on the mockingbird by the seashore, "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking." His voice came across the crowded room as from some open, quiet space without, its harmonies large and loose like those of the verse. And what a suggestion of melody as well as harmony there is in that song of the mocking-bird! How it brings up those night-notes that seem to be thrown out upon the air and then recalled, gathered in for a pause and another outpouring! Walt Whitman's reading of his verse established its right to be. He was really not a modern writer of poems, but an ancient bard and reciter of them.

My last glimpse of him was in his house at Camden, when he was recovering from a long illness. He was in an upstairs room, sitting in an armchair, clad in a long blue dressing-gown, with the usual expanse of immaculate linen. In this costume he sat serene and Jove-like amid an indescribable blending of bareness and confusion: a room of the plainest sort, with an unmade bed, very little furniture besides, a fire in a stove, on the floor a pile of wood, some

stacks of books, and some huge baskets filled with manuscripts, which overflowed and lay round in little heaps. He was gracious and cordial, talked of his illness and of the visits he had had, and showed us some French books that had been sent to him. He spoke of the fact that no new generation of poets stood ready to take the place of that which had grown old and would pass away with Tennyson, lamenting this result of the utilitarian tendency of the age.

Battle of the

A warfare has been raging Babies. in our midst, the echoes of which. have hardly yet died sullenly away upon either side of the Atlantic. It has been a bloodless and un-Homeric strife, not without humorous side issues, as when Pistol and Bardolph and Fluellen come to cheer our anxious spirits at the siege of Harfleur. Its first guns were heard in New York, where a modest periodical, devoted to the training of parents, opened fire upon those time-honored nursery legends which are presumably dear to the hearts of all rightly constituted babies. The leader of this gallant foray protested vehemently against all fairy tales of a mournful or sanguinary cast, and her denunciation necessarily included many stories which have for generations been familiar to every little child. She rejected Red Riding Hood, because her own infancy was haunted and embittered by the evil behavior of the wolf; she would have none of Bluebeard, because he was a wholesale fiend and murderer; she would not even allow the pretty Babes in the Wood, because they tell a tale of coldhearted cruelty and of helpless suffering; while all fierce narratives of giants and ogres and magicians were to be banished ruthlessly from our shelves. Verily, reading will be but gentle sport in the virtuous days to come.

Now it chanced that this serious protest against nursery lore fell into the hands of Mr. Andrew Lang, the most light-hearted and conservative of critics, and partial withal to tales of bloodshed and adventure. How could it be otherwise with one reared on the bleak border land, and familiar from infancy with the wild border legends that Sir Walter knew and loved; with stories of Thomas the Rhymer, and the plundering Hardens, and the black witches of Loch Awe! It was natural that with the echoes

of the old savage strife ringing in his ears, and with the memories of the dour Scottish bogies and warlocks lingering in his heart, Mr. Lang could but indifferently sympathize with those anxious parents who think the stories of Bluebeard and Jack the Giant Killer too shocking for infant ears to hear. Our grandmothers, he declared, were not ferocious old ladies, yet they told us these tales and many more which we were none the worse for hearing. "Not to know them is to be sadly ignorant, and to miss that which all people have relished in all ages." Moreover, it is apparent to him, and indeed to most of us, that we cannot take even our earliest steps in the world of literature, or in the shaded paths of knowledge, without encountering suffering and sin in some shape; while, as we advance a little further, these grisly forms fly ever on before. "Cain," remarks Mr. Lang, "killed Abel. The flood drowned quite a number of persons. David was not a stainless knight, and Henry VIII. was nearly as bad as Bluebeard. Several deserving gentlemen were killed at Marathon. Front de Bœuf came to an end shocking to sensibility and to Mr. Ruskin.” The Arabian Nights, Pilgrim's Progress, Paul and Virginia, all the dear old nursery favorites must, under the new dispensation, be banished from our midst ; and the rising generation of prigs must be nourished exclusively on Little Lord Fauntleroy and other carefully selected specimens of milk-and-water diet.

The prospect hardly seems inviting; but as the English guns rattled merrily away in behalf of English tradition, they were promptly met by an answering roar from this side of the water. A Boston paper rushed gallantly to the defense of the New York periodical, and gave Mr. Lang - to use a pet expression of his own—"his kail through the reek." American children, it appears, are too sensitively organized to endure the unredeemed ferocity of the old fairy stories. The British child may sleep soundly in its little cot after hearing about the Babes in the Wood; the American infant is prematurely saddened by such unmerited misfortune. "If a consensus of American mothers could be taken," says the Boston writer, "our English critic might be infinitely disgusted to know in how many nurseries these cruel tales must be changed, or not told at all to the chil

dren of less savage generations. No mother nowadays tells them in their unmitigated brutality."

Is this true, I wonder, and are our supersensitive babies reared perforce on the optimistic version of Red Riding Hood, where the wolf is cut open by the woodman, and the little girl and her grandmother jump out, safe and sound? Their New England champion speaks of the "intolerable misery" a very strong phrase - which he suffered in infancy from having his nurse tell him of the Babes in the Wood; while the Scriptural stories were apparently every whit as unbearable and heart-breaking. "I remember," he says, "two children, strong, brave man and woman now, who in righteous rage plucked the Slaughter of the Innocents out from the family Bible." This was a radical measure, to say the least, and if many little boys and girls started in to expurgate the Scriptures in such liberal fashion, the holy book would soon present a sadly mutilated appearance. Moreover, it seems to me that such an anecdote, narrated with admirable assurance, reveals very painfully the lack of that fine and delicate spirituality in the religious training of children; of that grace and distinction which are akin to saintship, and are united so charmingly in those to whom truth has been inseparably associated with beauty. There is a painting by Ghirlandaio hanging over the altar in the chapel of the Foundling Asylum in Florence. It represents the Adoration of the Magi, and kneeling by the side of the Wise Men is a little group of the Holy Innocents, their tiny garments stained with blood, their hands clasped in prayer; while the Divine Child turns from his mother's embraces and the kings' rich gifts to greet the little companions who have yielded up their spotless lives for him. Now, surely those lean, brown Florentine orphans, who have always before their eyes this beautiful and tender picture, absorb through it alone a religious sentiment unfelt by American children who are familiar only with the ugly and inane prints of American Sunday-schools, in which I have known the line "My soul doth magnify the Lord" to be illustrated by a man with a magnifying-glass in his hand. Possibly our Sunday-school scholars, being more accurately instructed as to dates, could inform the little Florentines that the Inno

cents were not slaughtered until after the Magi had returned to the East. But no child who had looked day after day upon Ghirlandaio's lovely picture — more appealing in its pathos than Holman Hunt's brilliant and jocund Triumph of the Innocents

could desire to pluck "in righteous rage" that chapter from the Bible. He would have at least some dim and imperfect conception of the spiritual meaning, the spiritual joy, which underlie the pain and horror of the story.

This reflection will help us in some measure to come to a decision, when we return to the vexed problem of nursery tales and legends. I believe it is as well to cultivate a child's emotions as to cultivate his manners or his morals, and the first step in such a direction is necessarily taken through the stories told him in infancy. If a consensus of mothers would reject the good old fairy tales "in their unmitigated brutality," a consensus of men of letters would render a different verdict ; and such men, who have been children in their time, and who look back with wistful delight upon the familiar figures who were their earliest friends, are entitled to an opinion in the case. How admirable was the "righteous rage" of Charles Lamb, when he wanted to buy some of these same brutal fairy stories for the little Coleridges, and could find nothing but the correct and commonplace literature which his whole soul abhorred! "Mrs. Barbauld's and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about,” he wrote indignantly to papa Coleridge, “and have banished all the old classics of the nursery. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs. Barbauld's books convey, must, it seems, come to a child in the shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers, when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and that Billy is better than a horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child.”

Just such a wild tale, fantastic rather than beautiful, haunted Châteaubriand all his life, the story of Count Combourg's wooden leg, which, three hundred years after its owner's death, was seen at night walking solemnly down the steep turret stairs, attended by a huge black cat. Not