colored dress
are "the lips of my unappeased desires," or describes March as a barber,
powdering the wigs of the blossoming almond trees, and a valet, lacing
up the rosebuds in their corsets of green velvet. Whatever he touches he
leaves artificial, "enameled," yet charming. The verses added in the
present edition are more pensive, even sombre. A life given to art
wholly, without patriotism or religion or philosophy, does not prepare
the greenest old age. There is a long and beautiful poem, "Le Chateau du
Souvenir," which he fills, not exactly with Charles Lamb's "old familiar
faces," but with portraits of his mistresses and of his old self. There
is the "Last Vow"--to a woman he has pursued "for eighteen years," and
whom he still accosts, though "the white graveyard lilacs have blossomed
about my temples, and I shall soon have them tufting and shading all my
forehead." There is also the accent of his irresponsible courtiership,
the facile and unashamed flattery he paid to such a woman as Princess
Mathilde. This personage was, or is, an artist; and we may not be
mistaken in believing that we have seen, cast aside in the vast
storerooms of Haseltine's galleries in this city--an example and gnomon
of disenchanted glory--her water-color sketch called the "Fellah Woman,"
and the very one of which Gautier sang: "Caprice of a fantastic brush
and of an imperial leisure!... Those eyes, a whole poem of languor and
pleasure, resolve the riddle and say, 'Be thou Love--I am Beauty.'"

The late poems, however, as well as the old, are filled with felicities.
They contain many a lesson of the word-master, who, though he did not
attain the Academy, left the French language gold, which he found
marble. The ornaments, exquisite licenses, foreign graces and wide
researches which Gautier conferred upon his mother-tongue have enriched
it for future time, and they are best seen in this volume.

* * * * *

Concord Days. By A. Bronson Alcott. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

In these loose leaves we have the St. Martin's summer of a life. Mr.
Alcott, from his quiet home in Concord, and from the edifice of his
seventy-three years, picks out those mental growths and moral treasures
which have kept their color through all the changes of the seasons. They
bear the mark of selection, of choice, from out a vast abundance of
material: to us readers the scissors have probably been a kinder
implement than the pen. Be that