By MARY ANGELA DICKENS. No. 99, Town and Country Library. 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

There have been few better judges of fiction than Charles Dickens, and had he lived to read his grand-daughter's first novel the veteran writer would have found pleasure in the thought that, after he was gone, the name of Dickens would still be honorably associated with imaginative literature. Cross Currents' is not only an excellent novel, but it is distinguished by a kind of excellence which is exceedingly rare in the work of a beginner. .. Every page of Cross Currents' inspires one with a desire to meet its author again. London Spectator.

"A new novel of original power and great promise."Scotsman.

Its equality of excellence is as uncommon as it is delightful."-London Academy.

HIS LIFE'S MAGNET.

By THEODORA ELMSLIE, author of "The Little Lady of Lavender," "A Queen of Roses," etc. No. 100, Town and Country Library. 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN. By Mrs. J. H. NEEDELL, author of "Stephen Ellicott's Daughter," "The Story of Philip Methuen,” etc. 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

The elevation of Mrs. Needell's style, her power in the development of character, and her skill in the management and evolution of her plots, make her books thoroughly worth reading." -Charleston News and Courier.

Of Stephen Ellicott's Daughter" Hon. W. E. GLADSTONE says: "I am desirous to bear my humble testimony to the great ability and high aim of the work." ARCHDEACON FARRAR says: "I find it exceedingly interesting, and like its high tone." The London Spectator says: "From first to last an exceptionally strong and beautiful story."

A CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF
UNIVERSAL HISTORY.

Extending from the Earliest Times to the Year 1892. For the Use of Students, Teachers, and Readers. By LOUIS HEILPRIN. 12mo, 200 pp. Cloth, $1.25. This is one of the three sections comprised in "The Histor ical Reference-Book," bound separately for convenience of those who may not require the entire volume. Its arrangement is chronological, each paragraph giving, in briefest practical form, an outline of the principal events of the year designated in the margin.

APPLETONS' SUMMER SERIES. Each, 16mo, tastefully bound in special design; price, 50 cents.

MR. FORTNER'S MARITAL CLAIMS. BY RICHARD

MALCOLM JOHNSTON.

PEOPLE AT PISGAH. By EDWIN W. SANBORN. GRAMERCY PARK: A Story of New York. By JOHN SEYMOUR WOOD.

A TALE OF TWENTY-FIVE HOURS. By BRANDER MATTHEWS and GEORGE H. JESSOP.

A LITTLE NORSK; or, Ol' Pap's Flaren. By HAMLIN GARLAND.

ON THE LAKE AT LUCERNE, AND OTHER STORIES. BY BEATRICE WHITBY.

ADOPTING AN ABANDONED FARM. By KATE SANBORN.

FROM SHADOW TO SUNLIGHT. By the MARQUIS OF LORNE.

TOURMALIN'S TIME CHEQUES. By F. ANSTEY.

Second Edition Ready of

AN ENGLISHMAN IN PARIS. Notes and Recollections. In Two Volumes, 12mo. Cloth, $4.50.

"The extraordinary interest of this book is heightened when we learn from what seems trustworthy authority that the writer is Sir Richard Wallace. . . It is certain that Sir Richard Wallace may be regarded as a Parisian by predilection and adoption, and that no Englishmen and few Frenchmen have had such ample opportunities of knowing the political, social and literary celebrities of the French capital during the last century. . Considered as a gallery of portraits and a storehouse of anecdotes, this work is unique in the literature of our day.". -New York Sun.

We have rarely happened upon more fascinating volumes than these Recollections. One good story leads on to another; one personality brings up reminiscences of another, and we are hurried along in a rattle of gaiety. We have heard many suggestions hazarded as to the anonymous author of these memoirs. There are not above three or four Englishmen with whom it would be possible to identify him. We doubted still until, after the middle of the second volume, we came upon two or three passages which strike us as being conclusive circumstantial evidence. We shall not seek London Times.

to strip the mask from the anonymous.'

THE DIAL (founded in 1880) is published on the 1st and 16th of each month. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION, $2.00 a year in advance, postage prepaid in the United States, Canada, and Mexico; in other countries comprised in the Postal Union, 50 cents a year for extra postage must be added. Unless otherwise ordered, subscriptions will begin with the current number. REMITTANCES should be by check, or by express or postal order, payable to THE DIAL. SPECIAL RATES TO CLUBS and for subscriptions with other publications will be sent on application, and SAMPLE COPY on receipt of 10 cents. ADVERTISING RATES furnished on application. All communications should be addressed to

WHITTIER.

If God reach down, whom should he take but thee?
Poet of Justice, Freedom's bard and friend,
Go thou up high. To Freedom's self ascend,
Where throng the just in holy liberty.
Poet of Prayers, singer of Piety,

Fly thou where holy precincts have no end,
Where praise resounds, and thankfulness doth send
Psalms up for aye and aye.
Love calleth thee
Her poet, and Man's, and God's. Now go thy way
To courts where perfect love is perfect light,
And tenderness pervades with precious ray,
Nor needeth beam of sun, nor knoweth night.
First to his own comes God, with them to stay,
And then to God his own up-taketh flight.

JAMES VILA BLAKE.

Swinburne's The Sisters.- Hosken's Phaon and Sappho.-Kipling's Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads.-Henley's The Song of the Sword, and Other Verses. Sharp's Flower o' the Vine, Romantic Ballads, and Sospiri di Roma.-Nesbit's Lays and Legends (Second Series). Pollock's Leading Cases done into English, and Other Diversions.- Lang's Helen of Troy, her Life and Translation.-Mackay's Love Letters of a Violinist, and Other Poems.Saintsbury's Seventeenth Century Lyrics.-Horton's Songs of the Lowly, and Other Poems.- Bates's Told in the Gate.--Lathrop's Dreams and Days.--Mrs. Moulton's Swallow-Flights. Susan Spalding's The Wings of Icarus.-Norton's Translation of Dante's Paradise. BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS

A good-tempered Englishman's views of America.Professor Huxley's hard crabtree and old-iron controversies.-A completed section of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Ethics.-An unsatisfactory biography of Thomas Carlyle.-Lessons from the Sermons of Theodore Parker.-Timely and charming chapters in Popular Astronomy.-Life and Manners in the Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky.-A chatty and gossipy book about Stage-plays.

185

190

192

192

193

195

196

THE THREEFOLD LOSS OF AMERICAN LETTERS.

Death has been busy during the past fortnight, and among his victims are three of those whose names are the most honored in American letters: John Greenleaf Whittier, lyrist of freedom and interpreter of New England's inmost spirit; Thomas William Parsons, bearer of the message of Italy and of art; George William Curtis, satirist whose hand was none the less heavy for being gloved, and steadfast upholder of the civic ideals that have made our nation great. Rarely has so heavy a loss been sustained by us, or so genuine an expression of sorrow been evoked.

Of the three men who have just been taken from us, John Greenleaf Whittier doubtless filled the largest place, and had the strongest hold upon the affections of his countrymen. He was one of the group of half a dozen poets whom most of us have grown up to regard as constituting a class by themselves, to think of as the giants of our young literature. Emerson and Bryant, Longfellow and Lowell, have gone; Whittier has now joined their company, and Holmes alone remains. Those whom we have been wont to look upon as our younger poets have really, by the insensible operation of time, already become our older ones, and still another generation crowds upon their heels. But it is doubtful if any other group of writers will ever occupy quite so high a place in popular esteem as is occupied by the group of which Holmes is now the sole living representative. Their work was done at a time when the nation seemed to have for poetry a craving that it no longer possesses, and when the influence of poetry was heightened by an exaltation of the national spirit born of the stress of

growth and culminating in a great political crisis. Of the group of poets with which he will ever be associated, Whittier surely was, if not quite the truest of artists, the best-beloved of men. With the sacred cause of human freedom his name, like those of his fellow singers, is indissolubly linked, and more closely than any other with the life of New England. For his life was so shaped that he never lost touch with the New England spirit, and the landscape, the legend, and the pastoral life of that region found in him an interpreter of the most intimate knowledge and unfailing sympathy. Snow Bound" is the poem par excellence of New England, and the familiar judgment that assigns to it a place in our literature similar to that occupied in English literature by "The Deserted Village" is as just as it is trite. But this is by no means the only likeness that claims the attention. Whittier's ballads make of him the New England Burns as truly as do his idyls the New England Goldsmith. And he may surely be called the New England Herbert whose simple faith found adequate and perfect expression in the lines:

66

"I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care."

In such lines as these (and they are not as infrequent in Whittier's work as many suppose), he attains the faultless and absolute simplicity of style that we recognize as the highest art, and that makes us prefer Lord Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar," for example, to many a subtler and more complex piece of workmanship. But still other suggestions of other poets recall to us the fact that Whittier's was not altogether the narrow range commonly recognized. 66 The Cities of the Plain" is Byronic, if a little imitative, and the poems inspired by the Italian struggle for freedom have an almost Swinburnian fire in their passionate denunciation of priestly and kingly tyranny. In "The Voices" and The Chapel of the Hermits" there is at least a suggestion of so modern a poet as Arnold, and Ichabod" is a more impressive lament over a "lost leader" than the one left us by Browning. Many other suggestions of this sort may be found if one will search a little for them, and Whittier's sincerity was such that he will hardly be charged with being merely imitative.

66

And yet, for we cannot quite disengage from their works the personality of our American singers.—it is the man no less than the poet who has so long had tribute of our affection and now has tribute of our tears. How earnestly and with what effect he threw himself into the struggle against slavery, is a matter of familiar history. And afterward, when the struggle was over, and the great work done, he wrote these memorable words: "I am not insensible to literary reputation; I love, perhaps too well, the praise and good-will of my fellow-men; but I set a higher value on my name

as appended to the Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833 than on the title-page of any book."

"It is indeed

Forever well our singers should

Utter good words and know them good Not through song only; with close heed Lest, having spent for the work's sake Six days, the man be left to make." Full of days and honors, the poet of New England has left a world made richer by his life. Fortune has dealt gently with him; how kind she has been was beautifully expressed by a writer in THE DIAL nearly four years ago, from whose article we reproduce the following passage: "To be, if not the acknowledged leader, at least the chief inspirer of one of the most unselfish of historic movements; to wed no bride but Freedom, and to bend her mighty bow to such flame-tipped shafts of song as other poets dedicate to some half-ideal Laura or jected of men, and in His spirit to rebuke the Beatrice; to be like his Master despised and rehypocrites and Pharisees of his time; to find all men as stocks and stones, and to realize the fable of Orpheus by drawing them all after him through the might of song; then, his Utopia no longer a dream, to live many years of peaceful activity and growth amid the benedictions of emancipated millions; such has been the happy lot of our heroic singer."

Thomas William Parsons was one of those poets who, like Landor, appeal to but a limited audience; who find their reward in the steadfast affection of the few rather than in the applause of the many. Judged by the world's crude test of popularity, his place in our literature is insignificant; measured by the exacting standards of art, few of our poets have so high a place as his. His work exhibits a fine spiritual endowment, and a mind responsive to the subtlest appeals of nature or of art. It will bear very close examination; indeed, its excellence fully appears only upon close examination. A certain old-fashioned manner in the work constantly reminds us that its author is one of our elder poets (he was born in the same year as Lowell). Italy afforded him his best inspiration, and it is as the translator of Dante that he is most widely known. His poem "On a Bust of Dante" is one of the finest things of the sort in our language. How well he could work in a lighter vein, when he chose, is best illustrated by the lyric in praise of Saint Peray." His translation of the "Cinque Maggio" poem of Manzoni was an achievement as successful as it was difficult. As for his translation of Dante into rhymed quatrains, it is certainly the equal of any other; many regard it as the best ever made. It is, unfortunately, incomplete, and what there is of it was given to the world in so furtive a way that many are unaware of its existence. The "Inferno," published in 1867, and the " Antepurgatorio," published in 1875, are both very rare volumes. A few more cantos of the Purgatorio" may be found in the files of the

66

"Catholic World." These translations and a thin volume of "Poems" (1854), are the author's chief claim to remembrance,- and yet no light one, for the quality of the work is exquisite, and it is quality that tells in the long run.

George William Curtis has left little or nothing of permanent literary value, and yet few of the men of letters of our time have exerted so wide an influence or occupied so marked a position. He belongs to the class of writers of whom Voltaire is the most illustrious example: men who do a very effective sort of literary work, but do not embody it in any shape likely to be enduring. They have their compensation in the consciousness of good work done, and in the wielding of an influence that they can at once measure and enjoy; but they know that for the future they will be only a memory. The gentle satirist of the "Easy Chair," the earnest editor of "Harper's Weekly," and the eloquent public speaker, now laid to rest, was a potent factor in the forces that made for whatever sweetness and light our civilization has attained to; all that he touched he adorned, and he dignified both the literary calling and the walks of public life. In the forefront of the anti-slavery agitation, of the movement for civil service reform, of the protest against the political attitude that forgets honor for the sake of partisanship, he followed his high civic ideals, regardless, on the one hand, of the "practical" man's contempt for so visionary a course, and, on the other, of the imputation of unworthy motives by the base. No "liegeman of the crowd,"

he well knew

BIOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY.

John Greenleaf Whittier was born December 17, 1807, near the city of Haverhill, Massachusetts. His early years were spent mainly on his father's farm, and he had a good common school education. His first published poem was printed in the Newburyport "Free Press," William Lloyd Garrison's paper, in 1826. The winter of 1828-9 he spent in Boston, and edited a trade journal. He edited several other unimportant papers during the few years following. His first volume, "Legends of New England," (in prose and verse) was published in 1831. In 1833, he took part in the organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society at Philadelphia, and from that time onward devoted himself to the cause of freedom. In 1835 and 1836 he represented Haverhill in the State Legislature. In 1840 he removed to Amesbury, where he spent the remainder of his life. He never married, but lived with his sister Elizabeth until her death in 1864. The titles of his more important volumes, with their dates, are as follows: "The Voices of Freedom" (1849), “Songs of Labor and Other Poems"

66

(1850), "The Chapel of the Hermits" (1853), "The Panorama and Other Poems" (1856), “Home Ballads and Other Poems" (1860), "In War Time and Other Poems" (1863), "Snow Bound" "The (1866), Tent on the Beach and Other Poems" (1867), "Among the Hills and Other Poems" (1868), "Miriam and Other Poems" (1870), The Pennsylvania Pilgrim and Other Poems" (1872), "Hazel Blossoms" (1875), The Vision of Echard and other Poems" (1878), and "The King's Missive and Other Poems" (1881). His complete works, in a definitive edition, were published in 1888. Mr. Samuel T. Pickard, of Portland, Maine, is appointed his literary executor.

66

Thomas William Parsons was born in Boston, August 18, 1819. He was educated in the public schools, and, after graduation, made a visit to Italy. This gave a clearly defined direction to his tastes, and the first cantos of his translation of the "Inferno" were published as early as 1843. In 1847 he went to Europe a second time. Harvard gave him the degree of M.D. in 1853. His "Poems" appeared in 1854, and his complete "Inferno" in 1867. In 1872 he published

"The Shadow of the Obelisk and Other Poems." He lived in England for a number of years, returning to his native city in 1872. He has since then lived in Boston, often spending his summers at Scituate, where he died on the third of September.

George William Curtis was born February 24, 1824, in Providence, R. I. He was educated at private schools, but left at the age of fifteen to go into business. After a year of this the boy broke away and joined the Brook Farm community, remaining there from 1840 to 1844. The next two years were spent in Concord, and the four years following (1846-50) in Europe. On his return he wrote for the New York newspapers and for "Harper's Monthly." At this time he became editor of "Putnam's New Monthly Magazine," and the failure of that publication left him with an indebtedness which it took him years of hard work to wipe out. During these years, besides writing for the Harper publications, he gave many lectures, devoting himself more and more to the subject of slavery. He married in 1856. In 1860 he was a delegate to the Chicago Republican Convention. In 1871 he was appointed by Grant chairman of the first Civil Service Commission, and in 1881 he organized the National Civil Service Reform League. In 1884 he led the Independent movement which resulted in the election of Mr. Cleveland to the Presidency. For nearly forty years he wrote the " Easy Chair" papers, and for nearly thirty acted as political editor of "Harper's Weekly." His principal books were these: "Nile Notes" (1851), "The Howadji in Syria (1852), "The Potiphar Papers" (1853), "Prue and I" (1856), "Trumps" (1861). In 1889 he edited the letters of John Lothrop Motley.

WHITTIER AND SLAVERY.

By the death of Whittier there has passed away not only the last of the great American poets that took the anti-slavery side in the great contest of our century, but also the distinctively anti-slavery poet. Longfellow spoke out clearly in 1842; but he was not of the warrior breed his "tender and impassioned voice" suited better other themes. As Christ's discourses hurl no thunders at particular sins, but elevate the soul above