grave poetry exclusively; and that it is not necessary or even desirable for a poem to come at once within the reader's comprehension. To take an extreme case, Tennyson's lines "Break, Break, Break!" would no doubt be ruled out of such a book as this by many in sympathy with children; yet the unexplainable power of the poem is not beyond the apprehension of sensitive natures at an early age.

The contents have been gleaned from a number of sources, and the editor is glad to mingle with the names of the secure dwellers on Parnassus those of some living Americans and Englishmen. He does not pretend that he has made an exhaustive collection, but he hopes the book may be regarded as the nucleus for an anthology which cannot, in the nature of things, be very large.

The prose, as already intimated, is confined to groups of proverbs and familiar sayings. In one aspect these single lines of prose present difficulties to the young reader: they are condensed forms of expression, even though the words may be simple; but they offer the convenient small change of intellectual currency which it is well for one to be supplied with at

an early stage of one's journey, and they afford to the teacher a capital opportunity for conversational and other exercises.

The order of this book is in a general way from the easy to the more difficult, with an attempt, also, at an agreeable variety. The editor has purposely avoided breaking up the book into lesson portions or giving it the air of a text-book. There is no reason why children should not read books as older people read them, for pleasure, and dissociate them from a too persistent notion of tasks. It is entirely possible that some teachers may find it out of the question to lead their classes straight through this book, but there is nothing to forbid them from judicious skipping, or, what is perhaps more to the point, from helping pupils over a difficult word or phrase when it is encountered; the interest which the child takes will carry him over most hard places. It would be a capital use of the book also if teachers were to draw upon it for poems which their pupils should, in the suggestive phrase, learn by heart. To this purpose the contents are singularly well adapted; for, from the single line proverb to a poem by Wordsworth, there is such a wide range of

choice that the teacher need not resort to the questionable device of giving children fragments and bits of verse and prose to commit to memory. One of the greatest services we can do the young mind is to accustom it to the perception of wholes, and whether this whole be a lyric or a narrative poem like Evangeline, it is almost equally important that the young reader should learn to hold it as such in his mind. To treat a poem as a mere quarry out of which a particularly smooth stone can be chipped is to misinterpret poetry. A poem is a statue, not a quarry. H. E. S.

BOSTON, October, 1893.