es to a mystical vision of human life by
comparison with which the scavenging epitaphs of the first half seem,
though witty, yet insolent and trivial. It is perhaps not necessary to
point out that the numerous poets and novelists who have learned a
lesson from the book have learned it less powerfully from the difficult
later pages than from those in which the text is easiest.

Mr. Masters himself has not always remembered the harder and better
lesson. During a half dozen years he has published more than a half
dozen books which have all inherited the credit of the _Anthology_ but
which all betray the turbulent, nervous habit of experimentation which
makes up a large share of his literary character. There comes to mind
the figure of a blind-folded Apollo, eager and lusty, who continually
runs forward on the trail of poetry and truth but who, because of his
blindfoldedness, only now and then strikes the central track. Five of
Mr. Masters's later books are collections of miscellaneous verse; during
the fruitful year 1920 he undertook two longer flights of fiction. In
_Mitch Miller_ he attempted in prose to write a new _Tom Sawyer_ for the
Spoon River district; in _Domesday Book_ he applied the method of _The
Ring and the Book_ to the material of Starved Rock. The impulse of the
first must have been much the same as Mark Twain's: a desire to catch in
a stouter net than memory itself the recollections of boyhood which
haunt disillusioned men. But as Mr. Masters is immensely less boylike
than Mark Twain, elegy and argument thrust themselves into the chronicle
of Mitch and Skeet, with an occasional tincture of a fierce hatred felt
toward the politics and theology of Spoon River. A story of boyhood,
that lithe, muscular age, cannot carry such a burden of doctrine. The
narrative is tangled in a snarl of moods. Its movement is often thick,
its wings often gummed and heavy.

The same qualities may be noted in _Domesday Book_. Its scheme and
machinery are promising: a philosophical coroner, holding his inquest
over the body of a girl found mysteriously dead, undertakes to trace the
mystery not only to its immediate cause but up to its primary source and
out to its remotest consequences. At times the tale means to be an
allegory of America during the troubled, roiled, destroying years of the
war; at times it means to be a "census spiritual" of American society.
Elenor Murray, in her birth and love and sufferings and desperate end,