allusions and phrases. In nature study
Hardy's novels are a liberal education, for beyond any other author of
the last century he has brought out the beauty and the significance of
tree and flower, heath and mountain. They may be read many times, and
at each perusal new beauties will be discovered to reward the reader.

KIPLING'S BEST SHORT STORIES AND POEMS

TALES OF EAST INDIAN LIFE AND CHARACTER--IDEAL TRAINING OF THE
GENIUS THAT HAS PRODUCED SOME OF THE BEST LITERARY WORK OF OUR
DAY.

Rudyard Kipling cannot be classified with any writer of his own age or
of any literary age in the past. His tremendous strength, his visual
faculty, even his mannerisms, are his own. He has written too much for
his own fame, but although the next century will discard nine-tenths
of his work, it will hold fast to the other tenth as among the best
short stories and poems that our age produced. Kipling is essentially
a short-story writer; not one of his longer novels has any real plot
or the power to hold the reader's interest to the end. _Kim_, the best
of his long works, is merely a series of panoramic views of Indian
life and character, which could be split up into a dozen short stories
and sketches.

[Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING A STRIKING LIKENESS OF THE AUTHOR
IN A CHARACTERISTIC POSE]

But in the domain of the short story Kipling is easily the first great
creative artist of his time. No one approaches him in vivid
descriptive power, in keen character portraiture, in the faculty of
making a strange and alien life as real to us as the life we have
always known. And in some of his more recent work, as in the story of
the two young Romans in _Puck of Pook's Hill_, Kipling reaches rare
heights in reproducing the romance of a bygone age. In these tales of
ancient Britain the poet in Kipling has full sway and his visual power
moves with a freedom that stamps clearly and deeply every image upon
the reader's mind.

The first ten years of Kipling's literary activity were given over to
a wonderful reproduction of East Indian life as seen through
sympathetic English eyes. Yet the sympathy that is revealed in
Kipling's best sketches of native life in India is never tinged with
sentiment. The native is always drawn in his relations to the
Englishman; always the traits of revenge or of gratitude or of
dog-like devotion are brought out. Kipling knows the East Indian
through and through, because in his childhood h