“ M. Cherbuliez has taken a simple and familiar theme—that of the family tutor in love with the young woman whom he is charged to instruct; but his treatment is so fresh, so brilliant, and so sympathetic, that he makes of his theme a new story. The outcome of the situation is neither violence nor despair—one of which would surely have been given us by a writer with leanings towards sensationalism,—but a chastened and philosophical acceptance of the inevitable. The characters are drawn with perfect fidelity to life; they speak and act in perfectly natural ways, and stand out in distinct relief. ”

“ We must imitate the Greeks, not by trying to reproduce their bygone modes of life and feeling, but by approximating to their free and fearless attitude of mind. While frankly recognizing that much of their liberty would for us be license, and that the moral progress of the race depends on holding with a firm grasp what the Greeks had hardly apprehended, we ought still to emulate their spirit by cheerfully accepting the world as we find it, acknowledging the value of each human impulse, and aiming after virtues that depend on self-regulation rather than on total abstinence and mortification. ”

“ Such a writer as Dickens, if he were living now, would command an audience all of whom would buy his works—of twenty millions at least. The world has never yet witnessed such a popularity—so wide-spread—as awaits the successor of Dickens in the affections of the English speaking races. The consideration must surely encourage us to persevere in our endeavors after the independence and therefore the nobility of our calling, and therefore the nobility of our work. But you must not think that this enormous demand is for fiction alone. ”

“ It is always—whatever variations the theme may take—the story of a man and a woman; often a sad, often an absurd story; but one which is as fresh with every generation as new grass with the spring. The dear little maid whom you now call the light of your house will soon reach her version of it. She tells you in confidence, and with a stammer on the long word, that she has a prejudice against boys,—and you know what that prejudice in the course of a few years will do with the incipient men who are hanging May-baskets or doing sums for her. ”

“ Among all your business activities, and in the eager pressing forward of your people, rejoicing in a vigorous youth, confident in a splendid future, reckless of what they spend because of the strength and resources within them, I rejoice to find springing up a new literature. Whatever be the future of this literature, which rises on the frontier line of East and West, it will be at least free from the old traditions. ”

“ Hence it is that fiction's peculiar ministry to the human soul is the prose depiction, through the lens of beauty, to the imagination and the emotions, of conflicts of human passions, wills, duties, and fates; a depiction unaccompanied by any tax of intellectual labor, but consistent with all known truth, though without any necessary intervention of actual facts. ”

“ It is distinctly the work of a younger woman—of a fresh young girl with a fair stock of reading and a vast stock of animal spirits, whose keen enjoyment of the novelties of foreign travel is bracingly manifest in every page of her diary. Miss North was a specially stout-hearted and independent traveller, one of the sort whose elasticity of spirits is more than proof against the annoyances and discomforts that form the melancholy refrain of the narratives of less resolute pilgrims. ”

“ Animated by an infinite love of truth, the aged statesman has bequeathed to his country the picture of a noble and upright, clear, if not altogether deep personality, in whoose life, both private and political, one can never detect any but the purest motives. At the smae time he has imparted to us in these memoirs many important and hitherto unknown documents relating to Sweden's most recent history, which no one knows better than he who has taken such an active part. ”

“ In every case the artist creates the type and the critic proves his competency by recognizing it; so that while the critic holds the artist to rigid standards of veracity and craftsmanship it is the artist who lays down the law to the critic. As an applied art, based on induction and constructing its canons apart from the material which literature furnishes, criticism was notable mainly for its fallability. ”

“ We have thrown away, or tried to throw away, tradition. We are growing in the habit of being sufficient unto ourselves. We have not Philistinism, but we have something else. There has been no name for it yet invented. Some say it is satisfaction in superficiality, and they point to the common school and to Chautauqua; the French say that it is satisfaction in mediocrity. At any rate it is a satisfaction that has a large element of boastfulness in it, and boastfulness based upon a lack of enlightenment, in literature especially a want of discrimination, of fine discernment of quality. ”

“ But for science, history—everything—except, perhaps, poetry—the demand is leaping forward year after year in a most surprising manner. Now, in order to meet this enormous demand, which has actually begun and will increase more and more—a demand which we alone can meet and satisfy—I say that we must claim and that we must have a readjustment of the old machinery a reconsideration of the old methods—a new appeal to principles of equity and fair play. ”

“ Curiosity should certainly be stimulated by so enthusiastic a description of a poet whose name means nothing at all to most English readers, but we fear that the case is a hopeless one. If the poet in question were a novelist, or even a dramatist, he might come into general recognition; but no lyric poet is ever appreciated outside the circle of those whose language he sings. Heine has come nearer than any other lyrist of the century to such general favor, but even Heine is known to most non-Germans chiefly for his humorous and ironical prose or for his pathetic life-story. ”

“ There seems to be a general impression that in a new country like the United States, where everything grows freely, almost spontaneously, as by a new creative impulse, literature had better be left to develop itself without criticism, as practically it has been left—every tree to get as high as it can without reference to shape or character. ”

“ In the form of pure romance it fosters that spirit of adventure which seeks and finds new worlds and which cannot be lightly spoken of while we celebrate the discoveries of Columbus. In all its forms it helps to exercise, expand, and refresh those powers of the imagination whose decay is the hectic fever and night-sweat of all search for truth and beauty ”

“ The growth of a story is usually slow, like the growth of most plants. It is labor and delight, pain and pleasure, despair and hope. You cannot escape a pang. You must absolutely live it through; and then try it by the test of ridicule of common standards, by the guage of human nature. ”

“ In our almost daily triumphant search, through the simple study of facts as they are, for the human race's betterment, we have learned to yield our imaginations too subserviently to the rule and discipline of the fact-hunters, and a depiction of desirable but as yet unrealized conditions across a chasm of impracticability is often unduly and unwisely resented.
"The world will do well to let its story-tellers be as at their best they have ever been, ambassadors of hope. ”

“ It seems to me that the thing the American literature needs just now, and needs more than any other literature in the world, is criticism. In the essay by Matthew Arnold to which I have referred, and in which, as you remember, he defines criticism to be 'a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world,' he would have had smooth sailing if he had not attempted to apply his principles of criticism to the current English literature. ”

“ Oilman is not to give a history of socialism, though he weaves the essential facts of its various movements into the texture of his discussion. He does not attempt to expound or refute its principles so much as to bring them into comparison with the American spirit, and in this indirect way he shows how far the spirit of socialism may be welcomed and also how far the socialistic programme conflicts with what is most precious and fundamental in our institutions. ”

“ Nothing could more strikingly serve both to emphasize and promote the reviving interest in the study of English literature than attempts of this sort. It may be trusted that the ancient Puritanism of our colleges is sufficiently mellowed by time ere this to permit such a vanity, and surely among the many new methods of teaching literature none could be more engaging to the healthy taste of youth than this, and none could serve to connect the study more closely with life. ”

“ It is a habit of looking at literature as we look at other things ; literature in national life never stands alone if we condone crookedness in politics and in business under the name of smartness, we apply the same sort of test, that is the test of success, to literature. ”

“ Hugo's highest achievement was in the lyric, but to the English-speaking world he was the novelist and hardly more. These statements apply with almost equal force to Herr Björnson; but who, unfamiliar with Norwegian, thinks of Björnson as a lyric poet? There is no help for it. We can translate novels, and plays, and epics; we cannot translate songs. A nation must be content with its own lyrists; the genius of the singer proper is, by no process known to the alchemy of the translator, reproducible in another form of speech than that in which it finds native expression. ”

“ The frequent letters of “F. H.” to “The Nation” are read with great interest and valued very highly, I am sure, by all American students of modern English. Nevertheless, there is something in these letters (if it may be said) that would be pleasanter if it were different. A reader of a half-dozen of them cannot help wondering whether “F. H.” has ever made a mistake,—the master is so masterful, his censure is so pungent. ”

“ At most one may discover under the vacillations of the moment an uneasiness in matters of social action, and in regard to letters in particular a growing belief that they are not merely a relaxation, an amusement, or a consolation, but that they ought to result in some direct teaching and help to man, tracing for him a line of conduct in life. This will be better understood after a rapid glance at the principal works of French literature during the last twelve months. ”

“ Knight found Kashmir the "safest land he had ever seen or heard of"—one of the few countries, indeed, in which it is possible for a lady to travel without escort in a perfectly unconventional way.
"Every summer English ladies wander about Kashmir alone, taking their caravans of native servants, baggage animals, and coolies, pitching their tents at night, and riding the stages in the same independent fashion as their brothers and husbands would." ”

“ No writer of English would seem better qualified for such a work, yet Mr. Morfill has hardly added to what one may get from an encyclopaedia on this subject. His book is sketchy, and one ends it by wishing for a guide through the maze of aimless energy which it portrays. What one needs is an explanation of Poland's failure in history, which Mr. Morfill does not give in his pages devoted to that purpose. An unpatriotic nobility, an intolerant clergy, a lacking middle class, and a degraded peasantry, were characteristics of all feudal states. ”

“ The calumnies once dispelled by facts, recovered with difficulty from the falsities and contradictions of pamphlets and anecdotes,—everything can be explained to the honor of this extraordinary woman, who had none of the weaknesses of her sex, who lived chastely in the midst of the amours of the most licentious court of Europe, and who, in spite of her meagre purse, was able to build admirable monuments, as if to repair the losses occasioned by the demolitions of the Calvinists, who inflicted as many wounds on art as on the body politic. ”

“ Literature has been active in all three of the Scandinavian countries, and we much regret that Norway should be unrepresented in the "Athenæum" symposium. Herr Alfred Ipsen, writing from Denmark, tells us:
"The public is tired of books crammed with discussion, so that they seem the works of so many journalists—tired of a sterile realism, which has ended with giving us only photographs of life, disregarding the human soul's everlasting thirst for something beyond or behind reality. ”

“ When the scientific treatment of literature culminates in such pseudo-mathematical forms of expression, it is time to call a halt. The variety and ingenuity of the author's diagrams—for he makes much use of the graphic method, as well as of the algebraical—defy any attempt at mere description. One of the less complicated of the figures gives us the abstraction Nature as a centre, and groups about it, at quadrant intervals, the four other abstractions, Will, Soul, Sense, and Spirit. ”

“ It has been left for Miss Alice French (Octave Thanet) to produce a book upon the subject which serves its readers not only as guide, but also as philosopher and friend. Every beginner in this intricate art knows how deep is at times the need of philosophy, and how consoling may be the ministry of friendship. Miss French has pursued photography through trials to triumphs (as some of the pictures in her book clearly show) , but she has not acquired the air of superiority that makes the successful amateur so cordially detested by all less suecessful aspirants. ”

“ It seems to me the best form for this story is the dramatic form. We want intensified life. 'It is the quality of the moment that imports,' says Emerson. Of what interest are our glacial periods, our slow transitions that change us we know not why? Everyone can look back on many differing persons he has been in his time. And everyone is conscious of undeveloped identities hampered yet within him. The sweetest and sincerest natures have repressions and concealments. It is the result of these things which makes the story of life. ”

“ Miss North's donkeyman, like most of his tribe, was a special linguist. He knew "a few words of many languages, and made the most of them by transposing and reversing their order in a sentence; for instance, 'gentleman like donkey,' 'no gentleman like donkey,' 'donkey no like gentleman.' He told his beast where to go, and the clever creature trotted off right or left accordingly. 'Donkey speak English,' then the donkey always put its ears back and kicked out behind,"—a proceeding reminding one of the intelligent animal that carried Silas Wegg to "Boffinses Bower" on a memorable occasion. ”