Mr. Howard's Review of Monthly

The Monthly for December prints three contributions of particular timeliness: a brief account by Mr. Tillinghast of the Harvardiana now on exhibition in the College Library, a cordial editorial congratulation of Professor C.E. Norton upon his eightieth birthday, and an ode, "The Founder," by R. E. Rogers. Mr. Rogers sees in the eyes of John Harvard, as they look out upon the Delta, a vision of the College which bears his name, and interprets for us the thoughts of the Founder with respect both to the past and to the future. He well brings out the Puritan loyalty to England at the very moment of the Separatists' revolt against the worldliness of the Established Church; but he seems unduly to emphasize the political aspect of their emigration; and he tends to make Harvard's seriousness rather more solemn than one should expect in an eternal benefactor of youth, "bearing contentment in his heart." I will not speak of occasional infelicities of phrase in this commendable attempt to give expression to the feelings of gratitude and the sense of duty which are our common inheritance.

The rest of the verse in the number is less ambitious. There are two sonnets, and a scene from nature in quatrains. Under the title "Them Marionettes," R. Altrocchi has cleverly adapted from the Neapolitan of Trilussa the description of a box of puppets after the play is over. The incongruity of the masquerade of dialect words and phra67ses in the most exquisite of literary forms humorously suggests the world of the marionettes, and the perfect equality and fraternity that prevail in the box symbolize the artificiality of social distinctions. This point is obscured, however, by the simile "like slaughtered sheep"; nor is it, strictly speaking, the "show" that brings beggars "astraddle of the guys what's got the dough." I question also whether the dialect is used quite consistently throughout. In any case, it seems regrettable that the phrase "bunched up" should occur twice in fourteen lines. E.E. Hunt's sonnet, "Cloud-land," is compact and musical, and induces in the reader a mood as sympathetic as the writer's with a rustic scene in the mountains. I could wish there were less alliteration, and a less conspicuous contrast between the homeliness of "celebrate" and "move along," and the ornateness of "snow-jacinth" or the elegance of "wain." It might be said further that a "purple vale" cannot be situated exactly "amid the clouds"; that "carolling and song" are one and the same thing; and that "the hills are gold--for children's voices hall" is a non-sequitur, in spite of the dash. On the whole, however, this piece of verse strikes me as the best of the three minor pieces; for Mr. J. H. Wheelock, in "Autumn by the Sea," lets deep call unto deep indeed, but with an unperspicuous symbolization: the sea is "autumnal" and yet "changeless"; "no trace of ruthless autumn lingers" there, and yet everything is remembered.

The bulk of the number is as usual made up of fiction. "The Big Violin" by L. Simonson does not realize the possibilities of a good idea. Mr. Simonson sought to show in a stolid Teuton character the triumph of idealism over a materialistic environment, in connection with the conjuring of a masculine spirit out of a bass viol. He finally puts into the mouth of his chief speaker an expression of confidence in this triumph which his readers will hardly share. The characters are flimsy, the narrative is not well articulated, and the style is crude. If one must quote Ger- man, one ought to get it straight; and I, for my part, should think twice before alleging that an "ice-water pitcher" was among the wedding presents of a German youth betrothed to the daughter of a Delicatessenhaendler. Mr. K. B. Townsend, on the contrary, has given us in his short story, entitled "In a Field," an uncommonly artistic and vivacious tale of two people in whom we can readily believe, and about whose subsequent fate we should be glad to hear more. Mr. L. Grandgent's "In old New England" is, finally, as its title indicates, a historical narrative, based, I suppose, upon the traditions of the Maine town of Pemaquid, where the scene is laid. The general conditions under which the English settlers lived during the French and Indian Wars are interestingly sketched, and the account of a sudden attack upon the colonists fort has real dramatic force, skillfully manipulated so as to lead to a conflict of motives in the breast of one of the defenders. One or two of the characterizations are somewhat perfunctory, and the language is here and there a little too consciously archaic: but Mr. Grandgent's persons, no less than Mr. Townsend's, live and act like human beings