was Rimmer's fate, on the other hand, to work in solitude, with very little sympathetic fellowship or appreciation, amid the prosaic surroundings of the western world.

A lack of earnestness has rightfully been charged to the great body of our artists. They have acquired a most difficult language, but they have no thoughts to express in it. In former days artists treated what affected them most thoroughly; the figures and events of religion and mythology were their themes. To-day the love of nature has been keenly developed, and we have great landscape painters. We have called upon our poets to treat the great features of nineteenth-century life. We likewise see our artists of the highest imaginative resources dealing with modern interpretations of the problems of existence. William Rimmer and Elihu Vedder, like Hawthorne with his mystic genius, are true growths of our soil; and although their country lacks an historic background and its physical environment is most prosaic, after all, it is the land of freedom and untrammeled thought. Like them, why should not others lift themselves above the barren plain of their physical surroundings, and give their thoughts free wing in the realms of ideality?

The mind has its bounds, as the sea has, and the command, Thus far shalt thou reason, and no farther, has been set up against it. That the flood-mark was reached ages ago appears to be demonstrated by Omar Khayyám, whose universality of intellect is evinced by a singular freedom from the limitations and prejudices of contemporary creeds and philosophies. When Edward Fitzgerald translated the Rubáiyát, he gave a new classic to the English literature. We feel that while other translations may be more literal they cannot so completely represent the spirit of the poet. Fitzgerald was fortunate in preserving the form of the verse, which appears

The water-lily on the wave is playing to and fro, But, friend, thou errst when thou dost say she's straying to and fro!

Her feet are rooted firm and fast in ground beneath the lake ;

A lovely thought her beauteous head is swaying to and fro.

The group of leading thoughts in the Rubáiyát, floating aerially and ever recurrent, are given appropriate form in the rhyme which, after the break in the third line, is ever brought back in the fourth, like the lily's swaying head secured by its anchored stem.

Mr. Vedder, as an artist interpreter of Omar Khayyám, is the peer of Mr. Fitzgerald. He has revealed new depths of meaning in the words of the great Persian poet-astronomer. He calls his work "an accompaniment of drawings," a music-suggestive term of the broadest significance. The conventional accompaniment is but a support to the song, a dull groundwork of which the hearer is hardly aware. But in the hands of a master-composer the accompaniment threads and pervades the song: giving new meaning to its melody; grasping, perhaps, the whole scheme; and reaching, through the tone-sense, depths of the heart and soul to which words alone could not appeal. Something analogous Mr. Vedder has accomplished here. His drawings rise from the rank of mere comments to embodiments of the poet's meaning; and frequently they carry the imagination beyond the poet to the real

problem which gave him inspiration. The scope of the poem affords him the adequate range and compass for seizing upon and imprisoning in art thoughts accustomed to soar to the thither side of space. Weirdness is a word which occurs to all who know Mr. Vedder's work, and yet it is but vaguely indicative of the mystic spirituality of its character, allied to which is a striking demonic element. With all the magnitude of their conception and the power of their imagery, these drawings possess an infinite tenderness, a grace and loveliness, which mark a close human sympathy as well as the utterances of a stern and inexorable fate.

The work is full of symbolic touches : some are evident at a glance, some will be found upon a short acquaintance, a few are explained in the notes, while others will reveal themselves only to the careful student. Upon the cover appears one of the most significant conceits. This pervades the work: the mysterious swirl of life, gradually gathering its forces from infinity; then a halting and a reverse of the movement, as in the eddy of a stream, denoting the brief moment of existence; followed by the dissipation of the forces as gradually as they gathered.

Possibly as many meanings may yet be read out of Omar's clear, crystalline verses as out of Shakespeare or Goethe's Faust. In Mr. Vedder's drawings there is a wealth of subtle suggestions which indicate how thoroughly the artist has absorbed and assimilated the work. It has been aptly compared to a symphony, with its leading themes, its divisions, and its variations in treatment; running the gamut of human thought and passion, from the sparkling present to the vastness of eternity, from the heights of aspiration to the depths of despair.

In the three symphonic movements, as we might call them, into which the work is divided by Mr. Vedder, marked first by the bitter cup of life with a - NO. 327.

VOL. LV.

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chaplet of prickly leaves, and second by the pardon giving and imploring hands entangled in the broken threads of life as they are stretched up to heaven, it may be easy to fancy the treatment of the same themes from the standpoint of life's morning, afternoon, and evening: the stormy passions of youth, the quiet acceptance of fate by maturity, and the philosophic contemplation of age which now and then reverts to the half-solved problems of earlier days. Youth is not all joy or heedlessness. Amid the gayety, the recklessness, the exuberance, of vitality occur the great problems of life. But they are received with stormy unrest; iron-handed fate is met with futile scorn, with rebellious bitterness. So we see in this part the facts and the problems of life stated in their various phases, from the keynote of the work, —

"Waste not your hours, nor in the vain pursuit Of This and That endeavor and dispute;

Better be jocund with the fruitful Grape Than sadden after none, or bitter Fruit," where, in the frontispiece, Omar is shown in the midst of his joyous companions looking down upon the conquering warrior, the miser, the scientist, and the priest, to the mighty conclusion of this part, with the Sphinx crouching amid the desolation of the wrecked world, her enigma,

"A moment guess'd then back behind the Fold
Immers'd of Darkness round the Drama roll'd
Which, for the pastime of Eternity,
He does Himself contrive, enact, behold."

last of four grand pictures of death, precedes the Sphinx and the dead world, whose hopelessness is relieved by a flash of lightning in the sky, which tells of a greater power than Fate.

The problems stated in the first part are discussed in the second. The inevitable is accepted, and the judgments of Fate are calmly examined by one who has struck from the calendar "unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday." The pleasures of life are enjoyed as they come. The wine-cup confutes the "two and seventy jarring sects," and the mighty Mahmud, a powerful figure of great beauty, Bacchus, scatters with his whirlwind sword "the misbelieving and black horde of fears and sorrows that infest the soul." A voluptuous dark-eyed maid appears beneath a vine with the question,

"Why, be this juice the growth of God, who dare Blaspheme the twisted tendril as a snare?

A Blessing, we should use it, should we not? And if a Curse why then, who set it there?

In this mood we behold the Present listening to the voices of the Past, in the guise of a graceful boy holding to his ear a sea-shell. In the same calm spirit we are shown a mighty conception. of the three Fates, whose coiled-up thread of life, distaff, and shears laid aside show that they have finished with this world and are dealing with the universe; casting out their cloud-nets into space, and seizing the planets, which are laid by at their feet, to be dealt with by the controlling powers. With this we read,

"We are no other than a moving row

Of magic Shadow-shapes that come and go Round with this sun-illumin'd Lantern held In Midnight by the Master of the Show.

"Impotent pieces of the Game He plays

Upon this Checker-board of Nights and Days: Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,

And one by one back in the Closet lays.

"The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes, But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes;

And He that toss'd you down into the Field,

He knows about it all- He knows-He knows!"

Then there is the mighty conception of the Recording Angel unheeding the hands uplifted in agony from below; later we are shown the Last Man with Love dead at his feet, but Evil, in the form of the serpent, still alive to whisper in his ear. Love affrighted at the sight of Hell, the Magdalen and Eve follow, accompanying the quatrain,"Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make

And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:

For all the sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blacken'd-Man's Forgiveness give-and

take!"

This makes the culmination of the second division, which is closed by the picture of the uplifted and imploring hands.

In the third "movement," as Mr. Vedder has treated the problem, the poet has concluded that he is neither altogether responsible nor irresponsible, but in a large measure self-dependent, under restrictions. The simile of the Potter "thumping his wet clay " is introduced much like a prefatory motif. The series of pictures which continue through this passage, recalling the scriptural "Hath not the potter power over the clay?" are exceedingly interesting in their interdependent relationship. It is the pot's discussion of the maker's intent, and the artist's fancy has invested the plastic shapes with characteristics of usefulness or simply ornamentation, but so delicately expressed as not to be in the least obtrusive. It is in this division of the poem that the oft-returning half-confidence in the prevalence of good over evil in the world asserts itself, as in the stanza,

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ered sufficiently emphasized by undemonstrative hints. From the close of this simile to the last quatrain the poet seems to be considering life through the experience and with the enlightened mind of age; and here are some of Mr. Vedder's most masterly efforts. Omar's grave, with its snare of vintage," marked by a slab, upon which are cut a lute with broken strings, an inverted cup, and behind all the mysterious "swirl," is followed by a drawing which brings back in full force the temptations of youth; then comes the regret, "Yet ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose," and in the next two drawings the end. That the conclusion is announced by drawings which are worthy of their position is a triumph for the artist, for he has steadily accelerated the interest from page to page, and made his climax fitting. The two drawings accompany the stanzas,

"And when like her, O Sáki, you shall pass Among the Guests star-scatter'd on the Grass, And in your blissful errand reach the spot Where I made one - turn down an empty glass." The former, in resentment of the inevitable order, is accompanied by a magnificent drawing representing Age uplifting youthful Love, who, cast down by the presence of evil, looks with horror at the ill-omened bird of prey, which has been driven from its victim. The drawing for the last stanza depicts the blissful errand of Sáki. Then follow the notes in ornamental borders. Mr. Vedder's explanation of the initial with which he has signed all his drawings is most ingenious and characteristic. At the end of the volume this signature is enlarged to the size of a full-page illustration, and with this added dignity we perceive for the first time that the simple initial has a meaning all its own. The broken ends of a reed, torn up by the wind, have been lashed together and

"That ev'n my buried ashes such a snare
Of Vintage shall fling up into the air
As not a true believer passing by
But shall be overtaken unaware."

The poet's wish was not in vain. The vine that sprang from his ashes is spreading over the world. Tales of its beauty are heard in all lands, and many are the believers who rest in its shade and gratefully share the bounty of its fruit.

The fact that one so readily falls into considering the drawings from a literary point of view is in itself, we think, exceeding high praise of Mr. Vedder's work. Seldom it is, alas! that an artist enriches his picture with enough inspiration to arouse his friends to that state of sympathy which is absolutely necessary to those who would express a truly valuable opinion on the work, as well as to those who would more thoroughly enjoy meditation and recollection of it. That picture is of little actual worth to the world which, having no trace of inspiration whereon to place a recognized value, demands position simply as a drawing. Is it not true of all great artists that their pictures appeal so directly to the soul of the observer that the mind accepts drawing for what it really is, a means to the end? We think it will be found that Mr. Vedder's pictures make their appeal in the same

way.

The mechanical execution of the book is worthy of a word. The plates seem to reproduce the drawings with little or no loss, and in one or two cases with

some trifling gain, which now and then follows reduction and translation into one color. This adaptation of an improved gelatine-printing method, made directly from original drawings, is a new feature in American illustrated book

making, and has been tried here for the first time in large and difficult plates. If the promise made by this addition to our illustrative methods is kept, we may hope to see other magnificent pictures contribute intimately to literary enjoyment.

THE Gentleman's Magazine, both the name and the thing belong to a bygone time. A hundred and more years ago the magazine was the property of cultivated persons, just as later on it was the reviewers', and now is the people's. Quanto mutatus, one involuntarily falls into saying, not with regret, but because in consequence of this change there is in these opening volumes of the series that is to preserve the salvage of the wealthiest periodical in English a peculiar quality, not perhaps to be called classical, but analogous thereto,

a unique mark, the seal and the brand that suggest age and arouse whatever instincts of literary epicurism linger among us. The best, the characteristic, portions of this serial are nearer the Queen Anne than the Victorian style, both in literature and in social traits. In many a passage one feels that Addison is not far off, and that Macaulay, who was the first true heir of his high and mighty seat on the throne of the British middle class, is as yet unthought of. Something of the variety that is essential to a complete impression of the tastes of our reading great-grandsires is lost by the method of grouping the extracts by topics; the virtuoso's collection thus provided misses the charm of being random and helter-skelter, as in the crowded rooms of Walpole's wonderful treasury

1 The Gentleman's Magazine Library. Being a classified collection of the chief contents of the Gentleman's Magazine from 1731 to 1868. Edited by GEORGE LAURENCE GOMME, F. S. A. Vol. I.,

of bricabrac at Strawberry Hill, but the modern editor of a scientific age must classify his specimens and sort each to its own case, just as he adds an index at the end. To us, however, these volumes will be less books of reference than sources of amusement and information, not about things as they are, but about the light in which the old masters of the liberal arts once saw them; if we can only get a fair look into their wainscoted studies, that will be enough for one day.

The old magistri liberalium artium, indeed, they were; though, as standards now run, they were an unscholarly lot. Yet with what an air they wore their patches of Roman learning! With what a natural ease and the amiable vanity of an antiquary, as they looked on at the rural sports and traditionary customs of the yeomanry, would they warm their memories with reminiscences of the festal days and rites they had read of in Ovid! The mythology of antiquity was their " open sesame to the curiosities of May-day and weddings and har vest homes. The modern investigator smiles at their apt quotations from the classics, and from the Welsh or Scottish scene described his thoughts fly farther and wider to the old Erse laws, the hillcountry of primitive India, and the raids of Australian aborigines in the obscure Manners and Customs. Vol. II., Dialect, Proverbs, and World-Lore. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.