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the best are given here, they are independent of time; but when, in the twentieth century, with the world shaping anew before our eyes, the poets of a country, according to Mr. Monroe's representation, write chiefly of nature, there seems strange anachronism in it all. work seems to belong to another riod. The monotony of the anthology, despite its salient poems and the admirable war verse of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Nichols and Robert Graves-may well be due to an editorial bias for a certain style, but this would seem to be disproved by the utter unconventionality of the selections from his own work that Mr. Monroe has included. True, they are of nature, but nature alive, and the Week End group of sonnets set one tingling for the great green world where "The fresh air moves like water round a boat." Mr. Monroe has a rare faculty of communicating a mood and of giving to his work the effect of improvisation. For quotation, the sonnets need the sequence, so here, instead, are two brief poems which originally appeared in that exotic but fascinating book, Strange Meetings, as did all the selections from Mr. Monroe which are included in the anthology:

If suddenly a clod of earth should rise, And walk about, and breathe, and speak, and love,

How one would tremble, and in what surprise

Gasp: "Can you move?"

I see men walking, and I always feel: "Earth! How have you done this? What can you be?"

I can't learn how to know men, or conceal How strange they are to me.

A flower is looking through the ground, Blinking at the April weather;

Now a child has seen the flower:

Now they go and play together.

Now it seems the flower will speak And will call the child its brotherBut, oh strange forgetfulness!

They don't recognise each other.

Several of the poets in former collections of Georgian Poetry are dead, notably Rupert Brooke and James Elroy Flecker, and several others have been omitted from the present collection in order to make way for new comers, of whom there are nine in this issue. The anthology opens with the work of W. J. Turner, who has not previously appeared. His work is marked by great precision, almost as if carved or chiselled. It has the quality of beautiful sculpture, particularly the poem of the Greek shepherd, sitting on a rock, watching his sheep when death comes to him from an aeroplane in the blue Attic sky. Nevertheless a little of this precision goes a long way ard the group by Mr. Turner is saved from monotony only by the first poem which delightfully

recaptures a mood of childhood. We can all remember when we were hypnotised by the mere sound of names which meant to us the mystery of the great, far-off world. Part of the must suffice to show its poem charm:

When I was but thirteen or so I went into a golden land,

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Took me by the hand.

My father died, my brother, too, They passed like fleeting dreams, I stood where Popocatapetl

In the sunlight gleams.

I dimly heard the master's voice And far-off boys at play, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Had stolen me away.

I walked in a great golden dream

To and fro from school

Shining Popocatapetl

The dusty street did rule.

I walked home with a gold dark boy
And never a word I'd say,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Had taken my speech away.

In the group by Walter de la Mare is an exquisite poem, Remonstrance; in the group by John Freeman, otherwise purely conventional, is a very human poem, Happy is England Now, and there are characteristic things from Davies, Hodgson and Stephens, but by far the most vital work in the anthology is the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Nichols and Robert Graves. There is an excellent representation of Sassoon, one of the vivid personalities of the war and one of the finest poets whose work the war has brought forward. I reviewed his work briefly in my article on Poets Militant, but brief quotations give, little idea of his verse as a whole. Sassoon is from India and there is an interesting mixture of the Orient and Occident in his work. He is a close friend of both Robert Nichols and Robert Graves, and it is pleasant to see the work of the three printed together, since they have poems to one another in their respective books on the war. The work of Robert Graves, son of Alfred Percival Graves, the Irish scholar, is boyish but full of character and of a fresh, direct, exuberant mood that is infectious. It gives high promise, while not yet of the maturity of that of his friends. But any utterance on the war by one who has lived it is significant, for this war, which is running like a flame through stubble and burning away all that is effete, which is compelling

new valuations and changing the whole aspect of life, is expressing itself through the souls of young poets more vitally than through any other medium. One sees a thousand marching men in khaki; they look alike, the uniform has robbed them of outward individuality; their faces. are set to the task; even in expression there is a certain uniformity which comes of a common wil! focussed to one end. Seeing this mass of men, this collective soul, one finds himself wondering what is in the mind of each; what that emotion must be that can transcend love and ambition and fame and even life itself. When one sees the thousand men multiplying to millions, all with the soldier's silence, they seem withdrawn, like men already detached from life and then comes the poet and speaks for them! The collective soul has found its voice, all speak through the one, all become articulate.

ARDOURS AND ENDURANCES, BY ROBERT NICHOLS

Of all the books through which the soldier has spoken in this war, Ardours and Endurances, by Robert Nichols, is the highest and finest utterance. It is splendour and flame. from beginning to end, the spirit seeming to have won clear from all the suffering and horror that war entails upon the body. As one reads the book he is in a perpetual state of wonder that human life can so transcend itself, that youth, to which mere physical life is an ecstasy and a passion, can so forget and forego all that had previously filled its existence. Nor is it that Robert Nichols is by nature an ascetic nor one who could detach himself from life more readily because he did not

love it. His pre-war verse is Keatslike in its love of beauty and keen with the passion of life. Only one who could feel the beauty of life so keenly could be blown to such a flame. by the spiritual need to relinquish it. He is altogether the poet, and yet many others surpass him in technique, it is much more the spirit than the letter of his work that makes him what he is. The poet feels more keenly than his fellows, the poet has a vision beyond them, and it is in these essentials of poetry that Robert Nichols is most significant; in these and in a directness and sincerity almost painful to the reader since they admit him so closely to a soul forging its armor in the imminence of death.

The poems are grouped, and were probably written, in an order that makes a continuous unfoldment of battle experience. Under Approach we have a succession of events intimating the increasing nearness of the battle, as this Halt by the Roadside, where the first sound of the guns is heard:

In my tired, helpless body

I feel my sunk heart ache; But suddenly, loudly,

The far, the great guns shake!

Is it sudden terror

Burdens my heart? My hand
Flies to my head. I listen..
And do not understand.

Is death so near, then?
From this blaze of light
Do I plunge suddenly
Into Vortex? Night?
Guns again! the quiet

Shakes at the vengeful voice.
It is terrible pleasure.

I do not fear: I rejoice.

This is not the rejoicing, however, that comes of mere lust of conflict, not a word of that sort is in the

Arrived at the battle line, we have another sequence of experiences coming to a climax in The Assault, one of the most graphic and dramatic pictures of the charge that we have had in war poetry. Robert Service has several poems which depict the same thing, but with the vast difference that he relates what he has observed or heard from others, he is not himself in the active fighting line; but on the Red Cross; whereas in Robert Nichols's poem we have not only the spectacle of the assault but the revelation of what it means to a young soldier to await the moment when he will scramble up the parapet and rush head down into the storm that greets him. The Assault is too long to quote, but certain passages will show the inner spirit of it:

My heart burns hot, whiter and whiter,
Contracts tighter and tighter,

Until I stifle with the will

Long forged, now used

(Though utterly strained)

O pounding heart,

Baffled, confused,

Gather, heart, all thoughts that drift;
Be steel, soul,
Compress thyself

Into a round, bright whole.
I cannot speak.

Time! Time!

These passages give none of the action of the assault, but merely the psychology of it. There is not space to give the charge as the poem goes on to picture it, but it is admirably done and proves Robert Nichols to be a master of nervous, direct, dramatic speech.

The remainder of the war section of the book is devoted to some exquisite lyrics to his fallen friends, poems that stir the tenderness and pity that one must always feel when such lives as these go out. One of Mr. Nichols's best known poems, Fulfillment, a poem which has found its way into most of the war collections, is an impassioned. tribute to the soldier and to the comrade love that "passes the love of woman." The highest and most beautiful association of men in arms is celebrated in these poems and one cannot but weep at the tributes to the ardent young friends who have, one after another, gone on to shining ranks elsewhere:

Oh, youth to come shall drink air warm and bright

Shall hear the bird cry in the sunny wood, All my Young England fell to-day in fight: That bird, that wood, was ransomed by our blood!

I pray you when the drums roll let your mood

Be worthy of our deaths and your delight.

In individual poems other poets of the war may have done finer things. There is, perhaps, no poem in Ardours and Endurances that will live as long as Rupert Brooke's sonnet, The Soldier, or Alan Seegar's I Have a Rendezvous with Death, but these were isolated poems and neither Brooke nor Seegar lived long enough to give us any body of poems interpreting the war, whereas in the work of Nichols we have nearly every phase expressed and expressed with such direct emotion that one does not stop to think whether any one poem stands out with finality as a piece of art. All are vital and moving and many of them are beautiful. It is, in short, a book to reveal the finer spirit of the war and to make us grateful that such dedicated young poets are helping to lift it above its physical horrors.

I

SPANISH AMERICAN LETTERS*

A VERY important volume, dealing with the activities of North American scholarship in the field of Spanish history and letters, is M. Romera Navarro's El Hispanismo en Norte America, published by the press of the Renacimiento in Madrid, Spain. The author has spent some years in the Romance Department of the University of Pennsylvania and has given undivided attention to all that pertains to this subject, which, as he proves, is a large one, constantly increasing on different sides.

Beginning with Washington Irving, Mr. Navarro traces the story of North American scholarship through Prescott, Ticknor, Longfellow, and Lowell, giving an extensive consideration to the Hispanic efforts of each in turn. He then goes on to a discussion of the great work accomplished by the Hispanic Society of America, including the scholarly labours of Archer M. Huntington and his Poem of the Cid; of Dr. Hugo Rennert and his monumental Life of Lope de Vega; of Professor John Driscoll Fitz-Gerald and his researches on Gonzalo de Berceo; of Charles Upson Clarke and his Collectanea Hispanica; of Jeremiah D. M. Ford and his Spanish Anthology; of Thomas Walsh and his version of Fray Luis de León.

*El Hispanismo en Norte America. By M. Romera Navarro. Madrid: 1918.

Rinconete and Cortadillo. By Miguel de Cervantes. Translated by Mariano J. Lorente. Boston: Four Seas Company. 1918.

Martin Rivas. From the Spanish of Alberto Blest-Gana. By Mrs. Charles Witham. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1918.

He also discusses Professor Schevill's Ovid and the Spanish Renaissance, and Professor Chandler's book on the Picaresque Novel, and gives such detailed notice to the numerous translators and editors of the Spanish masterpieces, that, with regret and surprise, we note the omission of the name of Mrs. Mary Serrano, to whom we owe our versions of so many of the romance writers of Spain. Mr. Romera Navarro is a student, and his book is redolent of study: he is an ardent Spaniard and has all the care we would expect for his national honour, as well as full appreciation for those who have laboured in behalf of his country's reputation. His work reveals marked critical capacity, and will long fill a notable place in our libraries as a record of our love and labour in the cause of Spain.

If one does not have, originally, enough reasons for rejoicing in a new English rendering of Cervantes's little masterpiece, Rinconete and Cortadillo, the translator and editor, Mr. Mariano J. Lorente, will provide them in his Introduction. For he discusses the previous translators and commentators of Cervantes with a practical sense that reveals the true Spanish acumen of criticism, as well as some of its pitilessness. He explodes the pretensions of the translations of W. K. Kelly, which are attacked by Dr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, and he is even more severe with the complete novels as rendered by Norman MacColl, who has been unreservedly approved by the same Glasgow professor. He proves Mr. MacColl's imperfect knowledge of Spanish, his superficial acquaintance with