CRITICAL SYNOPSIS OF

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RIP VAN WINKLE: BY WASHINGTON IRVING: Where the Catskills overlook the beautiful Hudson, nestled at their base lies the village of Kaatskill, where lazy, dissolute, good-for-nothing, but happy Rip Van Winkle lives a shiftless life, daily berated by his termagant wife. Rip's refuge and joy are the woods and the mountains, and, bearing his long gun, he retreats from his wife to his refuge. Rip is over-fond of schnapps. Climbing the mountain-side, he comes upon a sequestered nook, where a queer little company of short, broad and foreign-looking folk, with steeple-crowned hats and voluminous breeches, are rolling ten-pins and drinking schnapps. Rip joins in the sport and assists in emptying a small keg. He falls asleep. He sleeps for twenty years. He awakes to a new world. Wherever the English language is read, this story is known and loved.

SINTRAM: BY BARON DE LA MOTTE FOUQUÉ:

There are few stories of the supernatural which bring out the beautiful as well as does the weird tale of Sintram, by the author of "Undine." It tells of the young Norwegian lord who, because of the sin of his father, has been haunted from his early childhood by Death and the Devil; how he loves the beautiful wife of the French knight, Folko of Montfaucon, and is tempted by the "little master" to leave Folko to die in a bear-pit that he may take her for himself; how, time and again, he struggles against temptation and wins, only to be assailed anew with horrid dreams and visions; and how at last he conquers by his holy living and forever drives his dreaded companions and tempters away.

CRITICAL SYNOPSIS OF SELECTIONS

COMING OF ARTHUR, THE:

PASSING OF ARTHUR, THE:

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON: The old chronicles tell of time "when all the land was filled with violence," when there was no peace in Britain, when every man's hand was against his brother, when robber knights fought with each other and did deeds of rapine and dishonor; and how there came from some enchanted realm a great champion of right, of truth, of honor, and of peace. Long he battled fiercely with the forces of evil until they were subdued, and in all the broad land there was peace, safety and law.

The great poet Tennyson tells anew, in verse of matchless melody, the legends and traditions of how Arthur, the King, the child of enchantment, supported by magical power, freed the land_from its oppressors. Borne upon the crest of flametipped surges, he was cast, a naked babe, upon the storm-beat Cornish coast, into the arms of Merlin, the wizard, and trained by him to become at last the champion of right and King of all Britain. At the last, after a long life of conflict and victory, he is done to death by the treachery of his nephew, Modred. Drawn with the Knights of the Round Table into a snare, beset by numbers, all his knights slain about him, smitten deep by a stroke of the traitor's sword, the dying king commands his last remaining knight, Sir Bedivere, to do for him one last sad office-to hurl into the mere, whence long years before it came to him, his magic brand, Excalibur. The beauty of the sword tempts the knight to disobey the king's injunction. The king reviles him with words of bitter scorn. Bedivere, shutting his eyes, lest the dazzling gems again tempt him from his duty, hurls Excalibur far across the waters; a mystic arm rises from beneath and grasps it by the hilt, and it is drawn under. From far across the seas comes the wailing of many voices, a lament for the dying, chanted by mourning maidens, who crowd the deck of a mystic barque that sweeps to the strand to bear the king back to the magic realms whence he came.

UNDINE: BY BARON DE LA MOTTE FOUQUÉ:

This story is perhaps one of the most famous and beautiful of all tales of the supernatural. It tells how the little daughter of an old fisherman is drowned in the lake; how soon thereafter, in the midst of a beating tempest, there is cast ashore near his cottage an elf-like child, a girl, who takes the place in his heart left void by his daughter's death. As the years pass by, Undine, the child born of the rain and the waves, becomes a beautiful but perverse maid, vivacious, gay and happy, when the tempest rages, when the rains beat upon the roof, when the clouds lower and floods spread over the land; but in times of sunshine and under cloudless skies, the maiden is dull, despondent and unhappy. She is, in truth, a water sprite, a child of the unseen people who dwell far down in the waters of the lake. She has been cast ashore as an estray from her own world into the world of mortals, doomed to remain an exile from the water-world until she shall have won the love of a mortal soul and suffered penance; for it is forbidden that the water-folk shall wed with humankind without long suffering. The Knight Huldbrand, driven by the floods to seek refuge in the fisherman's hut, becomes enamored of the beautiful Undine. He wins her love, and she becomes his bride, only to enter upon a life of unhappiness and neglect. Huldbrand turns from Undine to Bertalda. The unhappy water-sprite warns Huldbrand, her husband, never, while on the water, to speak an angry word to her, for if that word be spoken, it will be the signal for her banishment from her earthly home to her own people beneath the water. Floating down the Rhine, the knight forgets this warning. He chides his wife, Undine, the water-sprite. Instantly unseen hands reach up from below, seize the wife and draw her down forever beneath the waters, leaving the knight alone and in despair.

EDITOR.

Vol. 4-1