"Where is my hat?" he asked. "Do you feel that you cannot abide with us through the night," said the minister; "it would be a sacred honor-" "Where is my hat?" repeated the convict hoarsely. The minister's wife held it at his elbow; he departed, hardly hearing Mr. Goodhart's apologies for not accompanying him to the gate. He found himself a little later sitting in the Paleytown station staring at a ticket to Boston and some loose change lying in his hand. He rubbed his eyes. "Dennis O'Hara," he soliloquized, "I wouldn't have thought it of you. The train is an hour late; there is time to go back yet. No! by God!" he shouted so loud that the station agent in the doorway dropped his lantern. "No you don't! and what is more you are going to earn ten dollars honest, and pay him back; honest every cent of it if it takes two months." He rammed the money into his pocket and stood up. His head was higher and his glance more direct than since, when a little boy, he had returned from his first afternoon at Sunday school. "I did not understand your question awhile ago," said the station agent. "Your train is on time; it is coming now." Lindsay Denison. CHAUCER. O Bard, who taught thee how to sing? Was it some hoary minstrel of those days of yore, That in a court of state or cloistered cell entuned thy lay? And Nature smiling with the budding spring, Did bid thee strike thy lyre and blithely sing? W. A. Moore. IT THE POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON. was John Ruskin who said, "No weight, nor mass, nor beauty of execution, can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought." And the alleged artificiality of modern life offers unconscious witness to this truth in the interest awakened during the past three or four years in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. It is a poetry that offers little or no opportunity for a false devotion; that affords no chance for worship such as has been paid the so-called impressionist school of art or the harmony of Wagnerian music, which, at best, can be fully appreciated but by a chosen few. The poems to some, indeed, may be wanting in much that is suggestive of true poetry as that word is vulgarly understood, but the careful and sympathetic reader soon discovers the pearls of the writer's thought, though they be strung on pack thread between common beads. Emily Dickinson, whom Hamilton Aidè says "narrowly missed being the most distinguished poetess her country has yet produced," was born in Amherst on the twelfth of December, 1830, and died there in May, 1886. Her life was spent partially in study, largely among her only trusted friends-the sunsets and breezes, the birds and flowers, and entirely in seclusion. By habit and temperament she was a recluse, spending years of her life without setting foot beyond her father's doorstep, and many more during which the limits of her walks were the garden hedge and walls. But though this mode of life led, as well it might, to a peculiar expression of her thought, we yet listen in vain for a note of complaint. Life and love was all very fair to her. Nature was her all, and if she "Looked through nature up to nature's God," with what our critic calls an "Emersonian self-possession," it was only because she looked upon everything with a clear-eyed frankness and candor as unprejudiced as it is rare. And this trait in her character stands out boldly in her writings. Every line was the mere expression of her own mind, and her sister, on going through her portfolio after her death, found not one poem bearing any evidence of having been produced with the thought of publication. Writing in this way she entirely lost whatever advantage lies in public criticism and the more or less enforced conformity to accepted rules and ways, but there was gained a certain unrestrained freedom, an unconventional utterance of daring thought that causes us to praise the intrinsic beauty of her work, and overlook what it may lack of extrinsic beauty. This is the judgment of George William Curtis and Mr. Lowell. They see the vivid descriptive and imaginative power, the flashes of original and profound insight into nature and life, and they regret with us the sudden failing of the lyric strains that came upon us so unexpectedly. And this they do without remark on the rugged and even whimsical framework in which the work is set. "When a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar is an impertinence." Perhaps Miss Dickinson had some such thought in her mind when she wrote: The Pedigree of honey This quatrain is quite indicative of her quick perception and close observation when abroad. She noticed as much as did Thoreau with this difference, that Thoreau could never have expressed himself with the same felicity. Could Thoreau, for instance, have written of the grass like this: And stir all day to pretty tunes And hold the sunshine in its lap. And bow to everything: And thread the dews all night, like pearls, And make itself so fine; And even when it dies, to pass To odors so divine; And then to dwell in sov'reign barns, And dream the days away ; Or could Thoreau have painted the sunset as it glows for us here upon the canvass of this obscure New England poetess: There seemed a purple stile Which little yellow boys and girls Till when they reached the other side Put gently up the evening bars, Surely such sight as this is all too rare among our lesser poets. There is one more poem that demands notice. It has not inaptly been compared to Dr. Smith's "Ode to the Flowers," quoted in full by Longfellow in his Outre Mer. It is perhaps the loveliest bit in the portfolio, and surely a most characteristic utterance of one to whom "the coming of the first robin was a jubilee beyond crowning of monarch or birthday of pope; the first red leaf hurrying through 'the altered air' an epoch." She has called it A SERVICE OF SONG. Some keep the Sabbath going to church : I keep it staying at home With a bobolink for a chorister, And an orchard for a dome. Some keep the Sabbath in surplice: I just wear my wings, And instead of tolling the bell for church, Our little sexton sings. God preaches-a noted clergyman And the sermon is never long; So instead of getting to heaven at last, Warwick James Price. NOTABILIA. A VAST amount of labor, time and patience has been exhausted over the workings and merits of the undergraduate rule. This measure was the result of an attempt to purify college athletics from the taint of professionalism, which had its origin in the inducing of prominent athletes to change their college attachments for a consideration, generally financial. The coaches, captains and advisers of all the Universities unite in denouncing this practice which is said to have prevailed in certain quarters. No end of gray matter has been wasted in composing rules with a bristling verbal parapet at every angle where the wily athlete might seek entrance-he who seeks college to exercise his muscles rather than his brains. While this laudable work is going on, more than a score of Yale foot ball players, some of them recently graduated, others alumni of longer standing, are receiving generous cash salaries for imparting to other colleges the knowledge of foot ball which they learned at Yale. These coaches, by receiving money, bar themselves from competing in any sort of an amateur contest. This ought to show that this business does not help to keep up the amateur tone of college athletics. These old players who are receiving from fifty to one hundred dollars each week, got what they are selling on the Yale Field. They were taught by men who gave much valuable time and effort in the attempt to teach, out of love for old Yale, the system of foot ball played by our eleven with so much success. They were taught foot ball, not as a means of making a livelihood, but that they might champion the college honor in a pure and lofty spirit of rivalry. There is not a college team worth mentioning in the country, excepting Harvard and Princeton, that has not secured or tried to secure a Yale coach this season. Why are Yale foot ball players in such demand? It is because there is at Yale a certain way of training and teaching |