resence of the
photographers and short-hand writers, and with an eye single to the
impression upon posterity. It is an eloquent book, and--need we say?--a
dull one.

_Kathrina: her Life and mine, in a Poem_, By J. G. HOLLAND,
Author of "Bitter-Sweet." New York: Charles Scribner and
Company.

Let us tell without any caricature of ours, in prose that shall be just
if not generous, the story of Mr. Holland's hero as we have gathered it
from the work which the author, for reasons of his own, calls a poem.

The petted son of a rich widow in Northampton, Massachusetts, whose
father has killed himself in a moment of insanity, reaches the age of
fourteen years without great event, when his mother takes him to visit a
lady friend living on the other side of the Connecticut River. In this
lady's door-yard the hero finds a little lamb tethered in the grass, and
decked with a necklace of scarlet ribbon, and, having a mind for a
frolic with the pretty animal, the boy unties it. Instantly it slips its
tether from his hand, leaps the fence, and runs to the top of the
nearest mountain, whither he follows it, and where, exalted by the
magnificence of the landscape, he is for the first time conscious of
being a poet. Returning to his anxious mother, she too is aware of some
wondrous change in him, and says:

"My Paul has climbed the noblest mountain height
In all his little world, and gazed on scenes
As beautiful as rest beneath the sun.
I trust he will remember all his life
That to his best achievement, and the spot
Nearest to heaven his youthful feet have trod,
He has been guided by a guileless lamb.
It is an omen which his mother's heart
Will treasure with her jewels."

Resolved to give him the best educational advantages his mother sends
him to Mr. Bancroft's school; or, as Mr. Holland sings, permits him

"To climb the goodly eminence where he
In whose profound and stately pages live
His country's annals, ruled his little realm."

Here the hero surpasses all the other boys in everything, and but
repeats his triumphs later when he goes to Amherst College. His mother
lives upon the victories which he despises; but at last she yields to
the taint which was in her own blood as well as her husband's, and
destroys herself. The son, who was aware of her suicidal tendency, and
had once overheard her combating it in prayer, curses the God who would
not listen to her