To the plough in her league-long furrow
With the grey lake gulls behind-
To the weight of a half-year's winter
And the warm wet western wind!

"To the home of the floods and thunder,
To her pale dry healing blue-

To the lift of the great Cape combers

And the smell of the baked Karroo.
To the growl of the sluicing stamp-head-
To the reef and the water-gold,
To the last and the largest Empire,
To the map that is half unrolled !

"To our dear dark foster-mothers

To the heathen songs they sung-
To the heathen speech we babbled

Ere we came to the white man's tongue.
To the cool of our deep verandahs-
To the blaze of our jewelled main,

To the night, to the palms in the moonlight,
And the fire-fly in the cane!

"To the hearth of our people's people-
To her well-ploughed windy sea,
To the hush of our dread high-altars
Where the Abbey makes us We.
To the grist of the slow-ground ages,
To the gain that is yours and mine-
To the Bank of the Open Credit,

To the Power house of the Line!

"We've drunk to the Queen--God bless her!We've drunk to our mothers' land: We've drunk to our English brother

(And we hope he'll understand),

We've drunk as much as we're able

And the Cross swings low to the dawn Last toast-and your foot on the table !A health to the Native-born!

"Would you say that the functions of criticism and of literary interpretation are distinct and separate from each other, or are they identical ?"

"I don't think that they are identical, but I believe that in the best and truest criticism both functions are discharged. One includes the other, I should say. The great principles of criticism lead us through the individual work of an author into the world of universal art. That is to say, every great writer illustrates the general laws of art just as he expresses certain general truths, and the great critic is he who not only gives us a definite impression of the man's value as a writer, but who also makes us see his relation to the larger world of which he is a part."

What Mr. Mabie has said in general of the highest exercise of the functions of criticism and literary interpretation is particularly applicable to himself, and entitles him to the rank which a recent English writer gave him, who spoke to an American audience of Mr. Mabie as "one of your best critics." The place which Mr. Mabie has undoubtedly taken in modern criticism has yet to be fully and adequately recognised, but already he has won a large following by his delightful books, and there is abundant evidence of an increasing interest in the literary career of one who has made a niche for himself in the world of letters. Approaching literaApproaching literature, filled equally with reverence for the unbroken vitality of its past and faith in its exhaustless future, and imbued with the virility and vigour of our democratic era, Mr. Mabie has caught the tide of the modern critical movement begun by Winckelmann, Herder, and Goethe in Germany, continued by Coleridge, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold in England, and in some measure by Emerson, Lowell, and Stedman in this country. He has inherited the new conception of literature which these names in modern criticism exemplify; a conception which has immensely deepened and freshened the feeling toward literature, and intensified the relation which it bears to life by opposing the vast and varied movement recorded in history as a development, a coherent expression of human life to a cold judicial criticism controlled by mechanical and arbitrary ideas. “Life is at bottom," he has said, "the prime characteristic

Literature is no pro

of literature. . . duct of artifice or mechanism; it is a natural growth, its roots are in the heart of man, it is the voice of man's needs and sufferings and hopes.'

Mr. Mabie lives in Summit, N. J., on one of the most enviable sites a writer could wish to choose. His house is literally a covert from the fret and fever of the outside world; wherever you turn you seem to be surrounded by trees, giving one the impression of a clearing in the forest, albeit the railway station is only a ten minutes' walk distant. Here, you say, is " leisure to grow wise and shelter to grow ripe." And while Nature forms a sanctuary without, home affections and the gentle influences of art and literature brood within and complete the charm which brings to man all that earth affords of heaven. Mr. Mabie's working den is upstairs; but we sat in the library, with its large windows, its capacious "study fire," its walls lined with books, and here and there stray evidences of the writer's craft, but all in order, betokening the deft touch of a woman's hand.

Mr. Mabie has reached that happy stage of life when one enters, as Browning describes it, into the possession of "manhood's prime vigour.' "I was born at Cold Spring, on the Hudson, and came from New York stock on both sides. My ancestors have always lived in the Empire State; one of them, my great-grandfather, Mercer Hamilton, was a Scotchman, and a graduate of the University of Edinburgh. From him I take my Christian name.

"I prepared for college under a private tutor instead of attending a preparatory school. I went to Williams College, where I took the course, graduating in '67. Among my classmates were President Stanley Hall of Clark University, President Dole of the Hawaiian Republic, Francis L. Stetson, Henry Loomis Nelson, the editor of Harper's Weekly, Gilbert Tucker, who has recently published a book on Our Common Speech, and Judge Teller, the Democratic candidate for the Court of Appeals."

“Did you have any profession in view when you went to college?"

"No, I had no definite professional aim in my education. I have been a great reader all my life; if there is anything which I might venture to claim for myself, it is that I belong to the class

Lowell called the great readers. I have been reading as long as I can remember. As a boy I was very fond of Sir Walter Scott's novels; indeed, my memory begins with Walter Scott. The first poet I remember reading was Longfellow.

"While in college I read constantly and omnivorously. I know of no greater joy I have had in life than the long winter terms at Williams when I used to begin reading about seven o'clock in the even ing, and read, often uninterruptedly, until eleven. In this way I gave five or six hours a day to solid reading. I found out then for the first time that the Greek classics were literature, and I did not discover it in the class-room so much as outside of it. I became also deeply interested, during this period, in German literature."

"When you left college, was it with the intention of entering on a literary career?"

"I had a very strong literary bent in

my aims and feelings even before I entered Williams, and while in college it almost became a passion with me. I had a group in my class, as I have already said, who were men of exceptional ability. We formed an informal talking club, which met on Saturday evenings, and our discussions on literature, art and philosophy were of distinct educational value to me. They remind me of Tennyson's account of similar undergraduate discussions at Cambridge:

"Where once we held debate, a band

Of youthful friends, on mind and art,
And labour, and the changing mart,
And all the framework of the land.'

But I was greatly lacking in confidence, and when I left college was still very young and immature-young, that is, for my years. I could not make up my mind to adopt literature as a profession, so I did what so many others have done under similar circumstances, I studied law, taking the course at the Columbia