author's affaire de cœur can find in the yellowed leaves of the little book, with its queer spelling and quaint letterpress, a charm that altogether fails of expression in the white pages and coldly formal type of a modern edition. The concluding paragraph of the third letter is at once an example of Pope's transparent self-depreciation, his ornate flattery and his unsurpassed neatness at turning pretty phrases. It is but a taste of what anyone can find free at his hands by drawing the Letters to a Lady from the library.

"I only desire you to observe by what natural degrees I have shrunk to the humble thing I now am; first from a pretending poet to a critick, then to a low translator, lastly, to a mere publisher. I am apprehensive that I shall be nothing of any value long, except, madam, your most obliged and faithful humble servant, Alexander Pope."

Lindsay Denison.

A LEIPSIC PROFESSORSHIP.

DARK and narrow stairway leads up to the top story where the Professor's room is. Down below, on the lower floors, it is so dark, one has to grope along; for the wall of the next building is close and shuts nearly all light out from the little windows on the stair-landings. But higher up here the dirty and broken glass gets a glimpse of the sky, so that one needs no longer feel his way. Great hollows are worn in the middle of the steps where the water collects as it drips from the leaky roof. There are wide gaps in the wall where the plaster has been knocked off. The rest is adorned with drawings, embodying in blue and red chalk, the political tenets of the young student who has the room across the hall. Up in the angles of the walls, the cobwebs hang unmolested. A card on the door to the right, tells you that this is the Professor's room.

The ceiling is low and the one dormer-window does not admit much light. But what there is shows a threadbare rug in the middle of the floor, a small stove with a long, bent pipe, two chairs and, hanging on the opposite wall, some roughly-made book-shelves. Books are piled up in all the corners, some covered with the dust of years apparently. They are, most of them, huge volumes bound in plain, uninteresting leather, with long, incomprehensible titles. On the wall over the stove hangs a cheap print of Frederick the Great. The paper has grown yellow around the edges.

The outlook from the window is not inspiring. Down below is the narrow street. The rumble of the carts and the hum of voices comes up, somewhat deadened, from below. Across there is a confused mass of red-tiled roofs and chimney pots. A dark cloud of smoke, through which the rays of the sun just manage to struggle, hangs over the city. Across the roofs to the right, the belfry of the little Franciscan chapel can be seen. Every morning and evening, at sunrise and sunset, the chimes ring and the sound, floating over the house-tops, comes first of all to the Professor's window. Up under the eaves, two sparrows have built their nest and the Professor always opens and closes the window gently, lest he frighten them.

There is a massive meerschaum lying on the window-sill, and from it rises a faint spiral of smoke which fades in the gloom of the ceiling. The smoker has just laid his pipe aside. "The Herr Professor," as his landlady calls him, is a man of a very slight figure and bent by long application to study. A pair of heavy-rimmed spectacles are pushed up over his forehead and are partly covered by his hair which is thin and turning gray. In his blue eyes there is a light that almost instantly makes one like him.

For twenty years he has held a professorship in the University-a professorship with only a moderate salary, of which the greater part has gone every year to help some needy relatives. And yet, as he sits by the window, he smiled, as if contented. Perhaps, after all, it is better as it is.

The sun is sinking lower. There is a hush even in the noise of the busy, unthinking city. A few struggling sun-rays manage to penetrate the maze of roofs and chimneys and throw a distorted shadow of the Professor and his chair on the floor and the opposite wall. He lifts his eyes from the book and looks out of the window.

The clouds are banked in the west and seem to follow the sun to the very edge to lean over to catch a last glimpse of him. There is something very beautiful in the way the light pours over their big folds, as if caressingly. "The Herr Professor's " eyes do not go back to the book. They watch the glory of the sunset. A certain sadness creeps into them. Perhaps some one, at his old home, is watching this same sunset,-one of his playmates, grown old and gray now some one, perhaps, standing there at the top of the green slope in the orchard, under the great appletree where, as a boy, on the warm summer days, he used to lie and dream away the hours.

There is a thrush up in the branches, chirping contentedly. The great red apples hang above, ripe and ready to fall. Through a great hole in the crown of his broad-brimmed straw hat, which he pulls over his face, he can look up at the blue of the sky and the white clouds floating there. Occasionally a swallow flits across. There is a hawk far up there, almost perfectly still. Where the sunlight filters through the tangled meshes of the leaves, the shadows are thick and soft. There is a low hum of insects in the summer air. The clumsy bumble-bees go stumbling amongst the clover-blossoms. That sweetest of all odors, that of the clover-fields, is about him.

As he lies there, with his bare feet plunged deep in the grass, he can just see over the red and white tops to where a blue-bird, on the fence, pipes cheerily as he flutters from post to post. In the next field, the wheat, dashed here and there with the scarlet of the poppies, is just turning to gold. All through the orchards the bright yellow of the dandelions is scattered. Across the road, the men are mowing. Now and then one stops to whet his scythe. How musical the note is! A lark rises with a whir-r-r and poises her

self in midair. The road dips just to the right and goes through the stream which flows on down the meadow. The serious-faced cows stand knee-deep in the cool water. As a team passes they slowly raise their heads while the bubbles drip from their mouths.

The poor old Professor! A smile that is sweet and sad comes over his face. He takes off his spectacles and wipes the glasses with his handkerchief and then quickly brushes his eyes. He is afraid to admit even to himself that he can cry after fifty-seven years!

Yet these are the moments when the Herr Professor really lives, when the fragrance of the clover-fields comes back to him, and the shouts of his boyhood's playmates ring faintly in his ears from across those distant fields of his old home.

WALT WHITMAN.

Lafon Allen.

EVERY great movement has its period of excess, and

usually some poet-laureate, whose sympathetic and sensitive nature typifies most clearly its extravagance. And democracy in this country has found him in Whitman. Feeling for the individual is found reflected in the poems of Walt Whitman more than in any other American poet, for he has deified the individual, and made the body soul. Of course this position seems extreme to many, and so we find the critics of Whitman divided in two very opposite opinions. He is either too coarse and heathenish to be read, or else he is a writer to be compared with Shakespeare. Mr. Robert Ingersoll thinks Walt Whitman is a reformer, who has done a great deal toward unmasking the hypocrisy of his time and calling people to look and recognize truth. But few of Whitman's countrymen give him so much credit, although Emerson early praised him as a rare and original poet. The interest in Walt Whitman in England is probably due more to fashion than to lasting approbation. It reminds us that a few years ago great interest in Thoreau was exhibited at an English University, when some of the students, in imitation of the genius of Walden, left town and lived in huts near a pond.

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What Walt Whitman really endeavored to teach was the excellencies and goodness of this life. He tried to exalt the human being, as human, and so is preeminently the poet of the body, making no distinction of importance between body and soul. His great love leads him to consort with the lowest human beings because he appreciates the good in every living creature. Mr. Dowden well expresses this by the quotation, "He caresses life wherever moving." Whitman saw the divine in man, but never saw the divine outside of man. And just here

we see the whole spirit of his genius, we see him a very giant of spontaneous love and sympathy, full to overflowing with life and the glories of life, but never realizing the beauty and grandeur of those truths taught by Christ. We can easily imagine him, marked by rare unselfishness, to have lived in Ancient Greece, and to have drunk in the old spirit of nature and love.

It is said that during the war Whitman spent most of his time in the hospitals ministering to the soldiers. He read to them, gave them his money, and even broke down his health in relieving their distress. Probably it was here that he gained the experience and material for his "Drum Taps," the poems which are filled with his expansive benevolence and strong power of description. But we have even more right to expect strength and manliness in a poet than in others and in his grand robust nature we do find that kindliness which so well becomes strength and greatness. Whitman is full of what Burroughs calls "aboriginal power and manhood." He has the strongest and most healthful feeling for earth, for man and for everything that is. And this is shown, too, in the manner he goes from the individual to the universal, and brings into a short poem many suggestive but not expanded subjects. So much has he yielded to this tendency that his poems have been criticised as mere catalogues. But we should expect a poet of democracy, as Mr. Dowden remarks, to be comprehensive, and a poet is excused in not elaborating every head, for poetry by its very nature is the antithesis of science.