me who are
masters of English undefiled might help the cause by translating some
of the best bits of Browning, Swinburne and Rossetti, to say nothing
of Tennyson, who has gradually constructed a dialect of his own and
trained us to understand it.

By fugitive poetry we mean the work of those usually classed as
song-writers and lyrists, leaving out the big guns, if we have had any
of the latter tribe since Milton, who was himself strongest in short
poems. Most modern poets have made their debut in the periodical
press, and those who did not have shown a painful tendency to run to
epic. The age respectfully declines epics.

We should not despair of the suggested revival. Ours is not the first
period that has suffered under the dealers in _concetti_. They have
had things somewhat their own way before--in the century which
included Spenser and Donne, for instance. Our euphuists may pass away
like those of the Elizabethan era, or, like the best of them, live in
spite of faults with which they were gratuitously trammelled.

E. B.

* * * * *

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Bits of Travel at Home. By H. H. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

The author's present home we should incline to fix in Colorado, but
she includes New England and California in her travels, and finds
something beautiful to describe wherever she goes within those broad
limits. The Yosemite, the Big Trees, the Mormons, the Chinese, the
snow-sheds, drawing-room cars, agates, prairie-and mountain-flowers,
New Hampshire life and scenery, and an infinity of like material,
are readably, and not incongruously, presented in her little book.
Population is so sparse and Nature so redundant in the scene of most
of her descriptions as to render them sometimes a little lifeless, and
oblige her to depend too solely upon her powers of landscape painting
with the pen. We miss the human element, as we do in the vast, however
luxuriant, pictures of Bierstadt and Moran--artists who preceded her
on the same sketching-ground. Not that she fails to make the most of
what Nature places before her. Rather, she makes too much of it, and
lavishes whole pages on truthful, minute and vivid, but bewildering,
detail of mountain, river, rock, plain, plants and sea. She is
enraptured, for example, with Lake Tahoe and with the wild flowers of
California and Colorado, and enables us to understand why she is so;
but the raptures are not shared by the reader, p