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nately after five or six the language of lowed to butter the slices of cake and children is apt to become pedantically then had whole-strawberry jam on the conventional and correct. The child top." If the speech of children of ten of ten, indeed, seems often to be train- is restricted in the matter of commening himself for a fauteuil in Mr. datory adjectives, it is equally reStead's proposed academy. He stops stricted in the way of adjectival dewhat he considers a new or unauthor- nunciation. Every one a boy dislikes ized word like a suspected person. or does not understand is "quite mad." Every phrase is challenged and in- Of course things in general of a disspected, and the parent or uncle who agreeable kind are always "beastly" or makes a slip in grammar or pronunci- "vile;" and why he should not be alation, or steps outside the conventional lowed to use these epithets where rut, is pounced upon and corrected they are clearly applicable passes his with all the primness of a pedagogue. comprehension. Obviously the lanThe boy of ten, no doubt, has the com- guage of the schoolboy is not a fleximand of a certain amount of slang, ble instrument. Gestures and low but it is of a limited and defined kind. whistles and clicks and winks may A special vocabulary is in use at his stimulate it into a certain vividness school, but outside this vocabulary the and picturesqueness, but per se the schoolboy does not think it good form language of the schoolroom is not half to travel. The language of children at as full of imagination and resource as this stage is, indeed, exceedingly the language of the nursery. Literary amusing on account of its cast-iron gentlemen on the lookout for new colstrictness. For months, nay, years, to- ors for the verbal palette may get gether one word of commendation is some startling effects out of the baby, considered sufficient for all needs. but from Master Jack they will learn Ask a boy of ten to describe his chief little or nothing. Meantime, we adfriend to you, to tell you, that is, vise the men of science to be careful what kind of a boy he is. Almost cer- how they build their theories on the tainly you will get as your answer, "mas," "bas," and "das" of knee-high "He's a very decent chap." There is infants. We have a strong belief ourno idea of depreciation. It merely selves that baby language is a purely happens that "decent" is the word of artificial product of the nurses and the hour for expressing all good mothers,-a tradition handed down by things. Asked what he would like his them, and not by the babies. If this friends to think of him, Jack will re- is so, the nurses and mothers could ply, "A decent chap, of course, father." change it if they would, and nothing In the same way Jack brings you his is more likely than that they would do favorite book and asks, "Don't you so if they saw the prattle of the cradle think, father, that this is an awfully set forth in printed books. They decent story?-all about fighting would never believe that it was all sharks under water with those rotten done for science, but would conclude rays or whatever they are, and a boy- that they and their precious charges pirate who ran off with a torpedo-boat were being laughed at by rude men and caught two archbishops; only its who know nothing about children. sickening rot at the end, all about his Just to prove these rude men wrong being in love with a little fool of a they would invent a new vocabulary, Greek girl, called Hydrant, or Haidee, and turn the laugh against the books or something." A new pistol is "a by making them obviously incorrect. frightfully decent one, don't you The nurses would only have to put think?" because it fires eight peas at their heads together to make "tatta" once; and the tea at a tea-party was mean "good morning" everywhere "very decent," because "we were al- from Chicago to Aberdeen.

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THE LIVING AGE COMPANY, BOSTON.

PLOUGHING.

High on the crest of the upland a ploughman stands with his horses, Figures of sculptured bronze they appear on the saffron skyline;

Low is the sun in the west, but a magical

shimmer of sunlight Sprinkles with dust of gold the rich brown earth of the furrows. Morn and noon had I watched him patiently guiding the ploughshare, Straining muscle and nerve as he urged his team to their labors; Once when a cuckoo sang he laughed and jingled his money;

Once when a bicycle passed, like a flash on the dusty highway,

Turned with a look of envy; then cracked his whip at the horses.

Musical were the heavens above and the

hedgerows around him;

Silver chiming of skylarks, fluting of thrushes and blackbirds

Canopied earth with delight, curtained her chambers with sweetness. Mingled with other notes was the voice of an emulous starling,

Vain of his bad imitation of more original minstrels.

Then in the joy of his heart the plough

man whistled a chorus, Whereto I fashioned a song in praise of ploughing and reaping:

"Hail to the plough and the oxen! Hail to the Lord of the ploughshare! Hail to the tamer of Earth! Hail to the builders of Home!

Huntsmen of old were our sires, or herdsmen seeking for pasture, Hither and thither they fared to and fro in the land;

Never the summer found them where the

winter had left them,

Hardly their tents were pitched ere,

struck once more, they were gone. But with the plough there came an end of their pitiful wand'rings,

For with the plough there came clearing of forest and fen;

Cottage and hamlet and village arose for

fixed habitations,

Thus I feigned him to sing; but he intent on his labor

Wasted no word on song, nor spoke except to his horses.

Now at the close of day he stands erect on the upland,

Modelled against the sky, a figure of labor triumphant

Over the subject earth, and scans the field he has conquered.

All the fair hillside is ribbed with his long, straight furrows;

Soon shall it break into green, pierced by a million corn-shoots;

Soon! too soon! shall it wave with full ears ripe for the reaping.

Aye! though the day was hard and his frame is weary with toiling, Surely his heart is glad, and the spirit within him rejoices.

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Gates that I never entered, gates of my villa of dreams,

Binding with cords of love man to the Is there a princess at all that your

place of his birth.

There they had played as children, there they had courted and wedded;

Dear was each well-known field, dear each familiar tree.

There were the graves of their fathers, there should their own receive them Back to the earth they loved, when they might till it no more."

shadows keep

For her lover, O garden discreet, in a golden sleep?

An. if behind your gates
Only a shadow awaits

The shadowy love that I lay at your portals, villa of dreams!

ARTHUR SYMONS.

From Cosmopolis. CURRENT FRENCH LITERATURE. It might have been expected that, as Switzerland is thronged every year with English people, the first Swiss novel would come from an English pen. But it has been left for an eminent French novelist to seize the dramatic elements which have so long been offering themselves in vain in the upper valleys of the Alps. It is doubtful, indeed, whether any Englishman living could have written the admirable study of Alpine life which M. Edouard Rod has given us in "Là-Haut" (Perrin et Cie). No persons, probably, have fuller knowledge of the physical conformation of the mountains than the large and intelligent section of English professional society which every summer make the Alps their playground. But we English have an extraordinary way of carrying about with us an impermeable crystal armor, which permits the penetration of visual phenomena and excludes all relation of ideas. We travel in Switzerland in large numbers, and we display every variety of gusto and intrepidity; what there is to do and to see, the English climber sees and does. But we form, as M. Rod has observed, an independent and tyrannical colony, "qui s'empare du salon pour danser les soirs de pluie et chanter des cantiques le dimanche;" we are "fort aimables d'ailleurs (oh! this cruel touch!) "pourvu qu'on ne nous gênât pas." But it never occurs to us-it would be foreign to our whole attitude and manners-to consider as civilized beings the inhabitants of the valleys we invade, or to speculate as to their ambitions or peculiarities. If our hotelkeepers are civil, our guides competent and steady, we ask no more; we make the Oberland a temporary English county.

It is, therefore, more than probable that this new story of M. Rod's (the most delightful, in my judgment, that he has yet produced) will be read with peculiar pleasure by English men and women who are familiar with the physical aspect of the High Alps, but have been prevented, by the national

habit of tyrannical shyness, from making any investigation of its people. Knowing the scenes so familiarly, English readers will follow with unusual intelligence a cicerone who can take them from châlet to châlet, and expose before them the hopes and desires of those human beings whom they have hitherto, unconsciously, regarded as portions of the landscape. The subjectmatter, too, of "Là-Haut" should be peculiarly interesting to our race, since it is we, more than any other people, who have led to its development. M. Rod (whose early Genevan experiences, doubtless, arm him with exact impressions of Swiss sentiment) paints the struggle between the old life in a mountain village-with its small inns, its warm local movement, its jealousy, its. individuality-and the new life of monster hotels, casinos, rack-and-pinion railways, and complete devotion to the complex speculative system of modern Switzerland. It is a very curious crisis in social existence which M. Rod has chosen to portray, and one on the outskirts of which we are almost as much at home as in a hamlet of Sussex or East Lothian, but of which the majority of us have been densely unappreciative. A young man, Julien Sterny, who has passed in public through a painful emotional experience, desires to hide his head for awhile, until the wounds of his spirit are healed. Driven by his agitated nerves from spot to spot, he takes refuge at last in the high Alpine village of Vallanches in the Bas Valais. (Where is this village? It has something of Orsières, something of Evolena. They are all of one likeness, these brown hamlets of the Valais, that look so Japanese from the cornices of the peaks above them.) Vallanches - all this is some ten or fifteen years ago-is still known only to a group who visit it, affectionately and loyally, year after year. Its modest hotels preserve their ancient aspect, great châlets transformed within to decently comfortable and clean, but not luxurious, lodginghouses. Its inhabitants, a sturdy clan, are bound together by ancient observances and cultivate a simple patriotism.

Visitors, even the vague English "misses" and their clergy, are faintly conscious of the personal note in the place, the singularity which makes it Vallanches, which distinguishes it from the machine-made health-resort. But M. de Ravogne, the great hotel proprietor, has his eye upon it. His idea is to make of Vallanches another Zermatt or Chamounix, to replace the ancestral quietness and reserve for the noise of a huge cluster of affiliated hotels and the "fashion" of a giant Ravogne and the mountain-spirit; the intrigues and the violence with which, step by step, he forces the little insulated community to sell itself into his hands, and become a mere link in his great chain of speculation; the pathos of the decay of independence in a small, ancient society dazzled by the mirage of sudden wealth. There is a thin, but delicate and sympathetic, thread of lovemaking which holds the story together; M. Rod owed this, I suppose, to the ladies. I confess "Là-Haut" would have seemed to me as interesting without it, since the charm of the book lies in its sociology, in the curious contrast between the ant-hill activities of this brown hamlet in the crevice of the mountains, and the cold, austere immensity of the landscape around it. The pure Alpinist will find much about his invigorating sport which is firmly and picturesquely told, without exaggeration or even emphasis. Under a slight disguise, those who know the history of climbing will recognize in one of the secondary characters the portrait of the lamented Emile Javelle. One is often asked to recommend a French novel that every one may read with pleasure; I am sure that no one who is familiar with the Alps could do better than buy "Là-Haut."

When Pierre Loti was received at the French Academy five years ago, among many strange remarks that he made on that interesting occasion, was one which must often since have been recalled by his more thoughtful readers: "Les écrivains," he observed, "qui peuvent, à un moment donné, ne pas se ressembler à eux-mêmes, n'ont pas d'âme." He was defending Octave

Feuillet, but thinking, surely, of himself

and of the withers of the versatile. It cannot for a moment be admitted, as a general proposition, that to play two games is to have no soul, but the advantage of personal unity in a man's work is emphasized by the paradox. And of Loti, if of any writer in the world, it is true that his superlative charm rests in la personnalité et l'unité of his presentation of life; in his being the instrument on which one poignant, exquisite air is played over and over again; in his being unable, in short, to present anything but a striking resemblance to himself, no matter what disguise it amuses him to adopt.

He is not disguised at all in "Ramuntcho" (Calmann Lévy). From the first page, where we are greeted by the curlews wailing over the grey flats of the Adour, to the last, where we leave the poor etiolated Gracieuse chanting, O crux, ave, spes unica from her whitewashed convent in a gorge of the Pyrenees, the melancholy sweetness of Loti is exhaled from every section of a book which is, in its narrow way, as perfect as his wonderful genius can make it. In this novel he returns to the mode in which we love his personality best. Without the occasional gaiety of "Pêcheur d'Islande," without the fulness which makes "Mon Frère Yves" still Loti's best book, he expresses in "Ramuntcho" just those instincts of resignation and pity, intensity and sympathy which made us welcome in "Le Roman d'un Spahi," so long ago as 1881, the rising on the horizon of European literature of what seemed a star of the first magnitude. Since then there has been no development in this amazing talent. Those who expected it to branch forth and expand have been disappointed; it fluctuates, but changes not. It was born full-grown, with certain qualities of delicacy and clairvoyance already perfected. The eye that notes everything, the heart that bleeds with the burden of humanity, the style that moulds into an incomparable harmony all the twilight tints and pale glows of experience, these remain as unique, as exquisite as ever. They

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