it seems an
undoubted fact that Mr. Crowley with a little added restraint and
dignity of expression, is capable of producing excellent work. "List to
the Sea", by Winifred V. Jordan, is a delightfully musical lyric, whose
dancing dactyls and facile triple rhymes captivate alike the fancy and
the ear. "The Wind and the Beggar", by Maude K. Barton, is sombre and
powerful. "Ambition", by William de Ryee, is regular in metre and
commendable in sentiment, yet not exactly novel or striking in
inspiration. "Choose ye", by Ella C. Eckert, is a moral poem of clever
conception and correct construction.

* * * * *

=The United Official Quarterly= for January opens with "A Prayer for the
New Year", by Frederick R. Chenault. Mr. Chenault is a poet of the first
order so far as inspiration is concerned, but his work is frequently
marred by irregularity of metre, and the use of assonance in place of
rhyme. The metre of this poem is correct, but the two attempted rhymes
"deeper-meeker" and "supremely-sincerely" are technically no more than
assonant sounds. Pres. Fritter writes very powerfully on our publishing
situation in this number; and his article should not only be perused
with attention, but heeded with sincerity and industriousness.

"Behind the Canvas Wall", by William J. Dowdell, is one of the cleverest
and most ingenious bits of fiction which the amateur press has contained
for some time. That it is of a nature not exactly novel is but a trivial
objection. The homely, appealing plot, and the simple, sympathetic
treatment, both point to Mr. Dowdell as a possible success in the realm
of short story writing, should he ever care to enter it seriously.
Another excellent tale is "The Good Will of a Dog", by P. J. Campbell.
The plot is of a well defined type which always pleases, whilst the
incidents are graphically delineated. "The Bookstall" is a metrical
monstrosity by the present reviewer. Mr. Maurice W. Moe, the
distinguished Private Critic, lately gave us the following opinion of
our verse. "You are," he writes, "steeped in the poetry of a certain
age; an age, by the way, which cut and fit its thought with greater
attention to one model than any other age before or since; and the
result is that when you turn to verse as a medium of expression, it is
just as if you were pressing a button liberating a perfect flood of
these perfectly good but stereotyped formulae of expression. The result
is ver