she discovered that we were 'in a rattrap.' In this remote, sleepy, comfortable South African farm she saw that change and death were stabbing human happiness, and that no help cometh from the hills. For each individual, lies in wait a great weariness and a great loneliness. The boy and girl cherish dreams, they are battered and baffled by life; compelled to submission to an idiot scrawl across the sky, prisoners in the hands of death.

There is no gush about it, there is no rhetoric in it, there is no false sentiment in it. She cuts to the bone, showing just what this painted veil looks like when growing youth has first realized that it can but 'strut and fret its hour' upon a stage where the reason is doubtful and the end is sure. Of 'the method of the life we all lead,' she says in her preface, 'nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act, and react upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes, the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are brightest they are blown out. And what the name of the play is no one knows. If there sits a spectator who knows, he sits so high that the players in the gaslight cannot hear his breathing.'

It is the protest of youth against life itself. That protest will endure while life endures; unless and until some new religion gathers up into a defiant assertion of man's supremacy over dead things the conviction that man's will triumphs at the last. It is given on

that limited scene with humor, with keen observation, with restraint, and that incalculable element of genius which makes, for example, the death of Lyndall an immortal scene in literature. Olive Schreiner in this book, as Bagehot's old lady said of Thackeray, is an 'uncomfortable' writer. In her observation she resembles Mr. Arnold Bennett. Tant' Sannie is only Auntie Hamps emigrated to South Africa, Bonaparte Blenkins is George Cannon with a more exuberant rascality, Gregory is Edwin Clayhanger with a little more tenderness, and Lyndall herself a Hilda Lessways who has become selfconscious instead of drifting through a universe, accepted, instead of defied.

The cry of Lyndall is the cry of one who protests alike against life and its ending; who endeavors to obtain in love escape from life; who can declare at the end with the heroine of the American poet, 'I hungered so for life. I thirsted so for love.' 'The gods,' whether of intelligence, malignancy, chance, or necessity, 'the gods are strong, and men should be very pitiful.' Olive Schreiner lived in an age when even that pitifulness had been forgotten by humanity. She saw first the outbreak of corruption and ruffianism submerging South Africa, and then, later, the whole world falling to pieces, with mercy and pity denied. After forty years of such a vision of night and darkness, the very appetite of life may have been abandoned. 'Blessed are the dead, Even so saith the spiritFor they rest from their labors - And their works do follow them.'

Like an arrow from a rainbow

That the armored plants have lain low, Stops to watch the dwarfs as they dance out of sight.

Hair long and black as jet, is floating yet on amber air, Honey-shaded by the shadow of Popacatapetl's cone; Their fluttering rebozos Like purple-petal'd roses

Fall through tropic din with a clatter of light.

The crooked dwarf now ripples the

strings of a mandoline,

His floating voice has wings that brush us like a butterfly;

Music fills the mountains
With a riot of fountains

That spray back on the hot plain like a waterfall.

Smaller grow the dwarfs, singing 'I'll bring shoes of satin,'

Smaller they grow, fade to golden motes, then die.

Where is the pretty one,
Where is the ugly one,

Where is that tongue of flame, the little
Cardinal?

[The Nation]

WITH WHAT STRONG SURGE OF PASSION

BY SUSAN MILES

WITH What strong surge of passion are we moved

When noble hearts we've loved are nobler proved!

You'd neither sought to hide,
Nor to display,

The wound I chanced upon in you to

day.

The hurt was healed, the hand that Anger in you had died, hurt forgiven,

Before I knew,

Before I even had begun to guess,
Your valorousness.
How blundering words had riven

What glowing love of you,
What pride, what shame,

Welled strong within and swift!
And I could only stand dumb and wet-
eyed,

Helpless, with cheeks aflame
And wits adrift.

How overwhelming is love's passion

ate surge

When noble hearts our meaner spirits urge!