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The twelfth and final volume of "The Works of James Buchanan," edited by John Bassett Moore, and published in a limited edition by J. B. Lippincott Company, is, in a way, the most interesting of all, for it is wholly biographical or autobiographical. large part of it is taken up with Mr. Buchanan's own account and defence of his administration "on the eve of the rebellion," published by him soon after the close of the war, at a time when he felt himself the subject of unjust aspersions. This personal narrative deals only with public events and public papers and includes no private correspondence. It affords the reader an opportunity to see just how the incidents which led up to the civil war presented themselves to Mr. Buchanan himself. Of less importance, though not without interest, is an autobiographical sketch of Mr. Buchanan's earlier career, and a brief biographical sketch by his secretary and nephew, Mr. James Buchanan Henry.

The publication of Sir Frederick Treves's "The Cradle of the Deep," in a new and popular edition, puts this vivid and diverting narrative of West Indian travel within the easy reach of the average reader. History, adventure, tales of pirates and buccaneers and first-hand sketches of the various West Indian islands as they are to-day combine to make a book which has no dull page in it. The first edition of the book was published only two years ago, and the author's observations come down to a date later than the Kingston earthquake. The West Indies are increasingly a lure for the beguilement of American travellers; and henceforth no one who takes one of the many tempting cruises among them, on rest or pleasure bent, should fail to carry with him this comprehensive and

up-to-date narrative by a traveller who knows both how to see and how to describe. There are 54 illustrations from photographs and four maps. E. P. Dutton & Co.

The many readers whose knowledge of Russian fiction is limited to some acquaintance with Tolstoi, and perhaps a little knowledge of Turgenev and Gogol, will find Professor William Lyon Phelps's "Essays on Russian Novelists" a guide into hitherto unrecognized realms. If they do not, even after accepting Professor Phelps's guidance and reading the books to which he directs their attention, altogether adopt his dictum that "Russian fiction is like German music, the best in the world," they will at least have possessed themselves not only of certain really great literary creations but of marvelously vivid portrayals of Russian life and character and social and political conditions. For it is chiefly with his own country and people that each of the great Russian novelists concerns himself. He has indeed no need to go far afield for tragedies of the deepest poignancy or for events of the swiftest dramatic sequence. Lovers of gentle and pleasant tales may as well hold aloof from the Russian novelists,-Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Gorki, Chekhov, Artsybashev, Andreev and Kuprin-of whom Professor Phelps writes in these essays: they will find them too sombre and too intense in their realism. But it would be difficult to find a book which, within equal compass, furnishes the reader who wishes to know Russian fiction as it really is, a more sympathetic and satisfactory guide. A complete list of the publications of the nine authors who form the subjects of the essays is given at the close of the book. The Macmillan Company.

NOW GOES OUR LADY TO THE
WOODS.

Now goes our lady to the woods:
Not that she needeth to take flight:
Her soul hath its own solitudes-
Its stars, on the most starless night,
Its light, on the most sunless day.
She takes not flight-she goes away
As quiet, queenly, rare, as here,
In Babylon, when days are drear,
She moves about. She does not fly;
She does not haste; she merely goes-
To where the dreaming poplar rows
Look upward to the Milky Way;
Where men have bliss of stars by
night,

Behold the gorgeous sun by day,
The colored seasons drifting by:

She takes not flight-but none the
less

Doth she rejoice again to catch
The spaces to her soul, and match
Her quiet soul with quietness.

The Academy.

F. N.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry, While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

'Neath the starred and leafy sky; For he suddenly smote on the door,

even

Louder, and lifted his head: "Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word," he said. Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the old house

From the one man left awake; Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone. And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Walter de la Mare.

The Saturday Review.

THE LISTENERS.

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest's ferny floor; And a bird flew up out of the turret Above the Traveller's head;

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

"Is there anybody there?" he said. But no one descended to the Traveller, No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his gray

eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still. But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men; Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair

That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller's call.

A LAMENT FOR YOUTH. From the forests of the night, From the palace of the day, He hath winged a distant flight; No more looms he on our sight, No more bows he to our sway. He was cunning in the mart, He was mighty with the sword, He was skilled in every art, Like a king he dwelt apart, And we fathomed not his word. Weep for hin, each denizen Of the valley and the hill, Of the forest and the fen! For he cometh not again To our glory or our ill. Wake the echo of the lyre And the melody of song With a full and tragic fire! For our yearning shall not tire Till it mourneth sweet and long, Till the weary desert's verge And the shaggy mountain's head And the quiet-crooning surge Hear, and answer to the dirge Of our Youth that now is dead. R. T. Chandler.

The Westminster Gazette.

L'admiration de la foule est toujours en raison indirecte du génie individuel. Vous êtes d'autant plus admiré et compris que vous êtes plus ordinaire.-Zola.

The most recent sale of impressionist pictures was held in Paris, in April, 1910, when the widely-known Pellerin collection was dispersed. The prices attained must have come as a startling revelation to people whose attitude vis-à-vis this style of painting has hitherto been that of the unbelieving scoffer. Buyers from every civilized country attended, and many and keen were the competitions in bank-notes ere the day closed. Pictures were acquired for the art galleries of the cities of Paris, New York, Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden and Munich, at prices ranging from £1,200 to £15,000. No less a sum than £71,000 was paid for sixteen pictures by Manet alone, many of which were of quite small dimensions, half a dozen of them being pastel drawings.

Twenty years ago, when I first advocated the formation in British galleries of collections of impressionist pictures, these identical works could have been acquired for a fraction-perhaps a fiftieth part of their present value. Magnificent paintings which literally went a-begging thirty or forty years ago are now changing hands readily at prices up to £20,000. The final test and consecration of excellence-the seal of the Bourse-is thus set upon work around and about which has raged by far the fiercest battle of art and interests which history records.

Naturally such an event as the Pellerin sale has attracted world-wide attention, and has aroused the keenest interest in artistic circles. Feeling that a brief account of the inception and development of impressionist painting might be welcomed by your

readers, I here set down the following lines. Yet to advocate the claims of living painters and present-day art is a thankless business, and no truer words were ever penned by the sage of Brantwood than that "he who would maintain the cause of contemporary excellence against that of elder time must have almost every class of men arrayed against him. The generous, because they would not find matter of accusation against established dignities; the envious, because they like not the sound of a living man's praise; the wise, because they prefer the opinion of centuries to that of days; and the foolish, because they are incapable of forming an opinion of their own."

The subject of Impressionism is one which I have much at heart, and with which I have for the past twenty years been closely associated. It is a subject which, I think readers will agree, requires wider ventilation and consideration than has hitherto been accorded to it in this country. An injustice remains to be righted, for men of superfine talent and grand achievementforeigners though they be still await that degree of respect and approbation which is undoubtedly their due, and which English-speaking people, when once the true facts are placed before them, will not be slow to grant. England is, strange to say, the only civilized nation which has hitherto steadfastly refused to recognize the claims of this style of painting. Even the Barbizon school, for sixty or seventy years ostracized, is only just now beginning to make its presence felt in our public art galleries and museums, and that principally through gifts of patriotic people whose pride is touched by the lacuna. Truly, in the matter of æsthetics we are a slow-moving folk.

To be labelled "impressionist" was

once the surest sign of an artist's unpopularity, and the surest and quickest route to poverty and obscurity. Possession of an impressionist picture was held to denote eccentricity greater even than his who should fling his purse over the Tower Bridge and expect to net bank-notes in return.

Art helps us to see. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can see. It has been said that to see clearly is "poetry, prophecy and religion all in one." If that be so we ought all soon to develop into poets, philosophers and saints, for no other form of art is so capable, I believe, as impressionist painting of opening our eyes to the feast of beauty so lavishly spread by Nature.

"Impressionism," says Georges Lecomte, "is worthy our utmost admiration, and we can rationally believe that in the eyes of future generations it will justify this century in the general history of art."

There is a sequence of advance in the art of landscape painting as clearly defined as that which, in the sister art of shipbuilding, has led to the production of our Dreadnoughts, Olympics and æroplanes.

To Claude undoubtedly belongs the honor of having been the first artist who ever thought of trying to render upon canvas effects of natural sunlight, or who ever conceived the idea that Nature unadorned might be worthy of study as an art apart. Claude, Poussin and Salvator may be regarded as the inventors of landscape painting, which is therefore but a stripling of some two hundred and fifty summers.

The accomplishment of those three pioneers is, however, incomparably inferior, from whatever point of view regarded, to that of our own countryman, J. M. W. Turner, the refulgence of whose genius has illuminated with undimmed vigor the art of landscape painting for the past century. In fact,

he practically created the art of which he still remains the greatest master. From 1773, then, being the natal year of that colossus amongst artists, dates all that is worthy of emulation in landscape painting.

Now since the greatest triumphs of Impressionism have been won on the field of landscape, it naturally follows that Turner, and in less degree his friend John Constable, are the true inspirers of the school. It derives from them as naturally and as easily as does the river from its mountain source or the flowers of the field from the sunlit sky. Truly has time fulfilled Ruskin's prophecy when he wrote of Turner that "Every day that he lies in his grave will bring some new acknowledg ment of his power, and through those eyes, now filled with dust, generations yet unborn will learn to behold the 'Light of Nature.'" For who before Turner "had lifted the veil from the face of Nature? The majesty of the hills and forests had received no interpretation, and the clouds passed unrecorded from the face of the heavens which they adorned and of the earth to which they ministered."

We shall presently see how France, through Turner's eyes, did awake to the beauties revealed by this same "Light of Nature," and how, through France, the world at large has been enlightened. Whilst in England Turner and Constable were striving after light, and more light, ambitious to imprison the sun's very rays upon their canvas, their cross-Channel neighbors were just as ardently engaged upon a system of painting of their own invention, and far removed in objective from that of the Englishmen. They resigned themselves to the impossibility of sunlight and atmospheric painting, and took refuge in obscurity. Incredible as it may seem to us, it is nevertheless a fact that no artist's outfit in those days, be he figure or landscape painter,