ing going on then, under the quaint old architectures and apparelings that we are reaching down and adopting into modern conditions, in our hunger for novelty or our caprice for the old, that satisfies itself with a shell out of which the life-bearing heart-richness has wholly departed, or become with us but a half felt and accepted commonplace. Truly, we have too much in these days! We need to be set back, to rediscover something of want and value and absolute satisfying for ourselves.

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In this same order of literature are the fine works of Mrs. Barr. She gives us, in a like way, atmosphere, representation, immediate touch. She makes us part and parcel with everything; with courtly ways and folk, or among rude, simple fisher people; she puts our very hearts into the place and emotion of theirs; her realism thrills all through with human character and passion; she ties us fast in her enchantment with a "Bow of Orange Ribbon."

And Mrs. Austin! Why, we are all Plymouth Rock Pilgrims, or Pilgrims' kith and kin, whether our fore fathers and mothers came over in the Mayflower or not, when we

get into her marvelous chapters of Old Colony record, transcripted into living, everyday words and deeds in their particulars; from the deaths and burials, the betrothals and weddings, the battles and hidings and escapes, to merry Barbara Standish's quips and gibes, and fair dame Alice Bradford's stately, simple, bountiful entertainments.

I must not leave out, in these rapid and rather rambling mentions, a set of stories, most delightful in their reproduction of English life in the last century, in the days of hoops and patches, and gay river parties, and tea-drinkings, and hazardous stagecoach journeyings, and hospitalities of dear old squires, and lovemaking in their country houses and prim, sweet gardens - the books of Mrs. Manning, who wrote "The Household of Sir Thomas More," "Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell," also "The Old Chelsea Bun-House," "The Ladies of Bever Hollow," "Mrs. Clarinda Singlehart," and a dozen others. Look them out if you do not know them; if you do, read them over and over again.

The very crowd stops me; the list is endless; the windows look so many ways. For

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types and leaders take the Kingsleys and Miss Yonge, with their clear portrayals of epoch, character, environment; James, much mocked for his voluminousness and for his perpetual solitary horseman," but a rich contributor with his "Heidelberg," "Richelieu," "Masterton," and a long list of other romances, besides his serious histories; George Eliot, and our own Helen Hunt, with their "Romola " and "Ramona," their searching demonstrations of tides and turning points, and principles and laws, in the careers of nations and of men; Marion Crawford, giving us, with versatile power, Orientalism, interior and higher Italy, modern

maybe not higher-America; Harriet Beecher Stowe, prophetess and commissioned apostle of the grandest gospel a nation ever rose up to and wrought out; Miss Mulock, Charlotte Brontë, exquisite in characterization, keen in vivisection, standing each apart in her own preempted world of genius; Jean Ingelow, sweet and fresh, strong and tender, in prose that is one with her perfect poetry; take the long line of social writers, who unroll for us, as in woven tapestries, exact with stitch and tint in every detail, all that curiously and viv

idly delights us in the manner and doing of that last old century that seems so far remote, and down through the teeming, rushing hundred years that have plunged us into the tumultuous now: Goldsmith, Richardson, Mrs. Opie, Miss Burney, Miss Austen, Miss Mitford, William and Mary Howitt, Thackeray, Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, Howells, Aldrich, Mrs. Burnett; Miss Jewett and Miss Wilkins, inimitable in their handling of the peculiarities, unique upon the planet, of our New England nooks and people; take the domestic and religious annalists: Miss Yonge again, Miss Sewell, MacDonald, with his heart-hold and insistence of God and man relations, grand and intimate; the delicate life etchings of Juliana Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth, Barrie, with nature and pathos in them so simple-deep that you can only by the same deep simplicity apprehend them; bright, true, tender Saxe Holm; Mrs. Gilman, Mrs. Kirkland, limners of old, kindly Southern plantation life, and of brave, cheery pioneering in our rich, wild, early West; Mrs. Charlesworth, with her "Ministering Children;" dear Mrs. Prentiss' "Stepping Heavenward;" our grow

ing host of American women writers, — dear girls, it is simply impossible for me even to enumerate; the libraries are full; turn in, as to a rich garden, fall to, and find your own! Only keep your instinct high, and taste not, nor even touch, the fruit of any tree that blossoms with knowledge of evil!

Books for amusement; books of imagination, all these, so classed, thus far; I am giving them no larger place than they take, and keep. One last word about this imagination, out of which "fiction"-"made-up literature comes. It is a slighting sort of name for it, spoken often - almost always, formerly with contempt or apology or indulgence by those who hold everything imaginative to be unreal, and unreality the unforgiven sin. But it is not true that imagination itself is unreality. It is only so when it supersedes, misrepresents, or excludes fact. Undoubtedly mere lawless, unbridled fancy is falseness; and falseness is central wrong. It is the "out of square" at the beginning that ends in a whole building crooked and unsafe: that way is insanity. But books of true imagination are for far more than amusement. They are for