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this time drawn by "Omar" Fitzgerald in in the Song which the Man called out beforehand one of his letters to Mrs. Kemble:

Now once more for French Songs. When I was in Paris in 1830, just before that Revolution, I stopped one Evening on the Boulevards by the Madeleine to listen to a Man who was singing to his Barrel-organ. Several passing "Blouses" had stopped also; not only to listen, but to join in the Songs, having bought little "Libretti" of the words from the Musician. I bought one too, for, I suppose, the smallest French Coin; and assisted

(as they do Hymns at Church), and of which I enclose you the poor little Copy. "Le Bon Pasteur, s'il vous plait "-I suppose the Circumstances: the "beau temps," the pleasant Boulevards, the then so amiable People, all contributed to the effect this Song had upon me; anyhow, it has constantly revisited my memory, for these forty-three years; and Iwas thinking, the other day, touched me more than any of Béranger's most beautiful Things. This, however, may be only one of "Old Fitz's" Crotchets, as Tennyson and others would call them.

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long streamers of the bonne who makes so engaging a figure in the sunny gardens of the Tuileries, or about the ill-fitting garb of the gendarme, is that they all mark so much more than the mere difference in dress between the French and ourselves. In one of his grim romances embodying speculations on the future state of society, Mr. Wells pictures a whole world of human creatures distinguished as to their relations to the dominating government by simple uniforms. The vision as he presents it is appalling, but with what an artless grace do the French, and, for that matter, the peoples of all Europe, wear their various uniforms! They wear them as they wear their hair, with no thought of artifice or of invidious class distinction. The blouse of the peasant, like the robe of the lawyer, is so part of his natural life that he cannot imagine himself without it; what is picturesque to us is an honorable commonplace to him. So Mr. Wright's drawings are not studies of costume; they are portraits of people.

They deserve to be described as such because, spontaneous and slight as they are, they nevertheless render a great deal, especially in carriage, in movement, that belong to the very essence of his subject. His soldiers sketched at Fontainebleau are French soldiers in every detail of their demeanor. When he sketches the German officer he shows the same aptitude in catching just the right gesture, just the right expression. So it is with his drawings of the idlers in the Boulevard café, of fishermen lounging on the banks of the Seine, of nuns and priests, of the shabby book-lover turning over the contents of the stall on the Quai, and so on through the long list of types he has observed. This sort of thing has been done over and over again by artists. Scores of them have delighted to sketch the crowded top of a Paris bus, the sleepy occupants of a Continental train, or the stolid travellers in a German tavern. Seldom, however, have they done the trick as Mr. Wright has done it, so tersely, so vivaciously, and with so much truth. His sketch-books are full of "local color," but that much abused quality is never overdone, and while he has rightly laid so much stress upon the human interest in his subject, he has not neglected the background. He has at once kept it in its place and used it legitimately to increase the French or the German atmosphere of

VOL. XL.-22

his tiny pictures. Also he has remembered the light and air upon which, as I said at the outset, more even depends than depends upon the most picturesque buildings.

It is always nature that, after mankind, illuminates and vivifies the scene. The climax in the romantically conceived chateaux of Europe comes in the broken sky-line where roofs and turrets are lifted against the blue. Light is the great solvent, and it is curious to think of the different effects it produces in different parts of Europe. The light in Paris, where so many of Mr. Wright's sketches have been made, is a precious part of one's memories of that city. There is a beautiful touch of it in the opening lines of the late John Hay's "Sunrise in the Place de la Concorde":

I stand at the break of day
In the Champs Elysées.
The tremulous shafts of dawning
As they shoot o'er the Tuileries early,
Strike Luxor's cold gray spire,
And wild in the light of the morning
With their marble manes on fire,
Ramp the white Horses of Marly.

This has the true poetic quality, and so it is impossible to put a finger on just the element in it that makes it so clairvoyant a bit of impressionism. It has for me a suggestion of the Place de la Concorde which no amount of labored description could give. Perhaps it is because it makes one feel the light that is there, bringing back in a kind of vision the glory of that majestic space as it is filled and transfigured by the sun. I do not think it is mere whim that finds a city more distinctly individualized in certain moments than in others. Claude Monet's notion of painting one subject over and over again at different times of day yields brilliant schemes of color, but it has one drawback-it obscures the salient moment in which a given scene seems most itself, discloses the last depths of its essential character. Paris, for example, is no doubt very much herself amid the violent lights and shadows of Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame," and in the sombre tones of Méryon's extraordinary etchings, but she is in such works the Paris of a tragic past. The Paris that we know to-day and which seems somehow to express the very soul of the modern French people is the Paris of just such à vignette as Hay drew in the passage I have quoted. A vast gleaming place, mundane

to the core, lucid, alert, brimming over with the joy of life-and somehow a little cold. There are a thousand nooks and corners in the great metropolis, a thousand vistas, which come back into the mind at the mere mention of its name, but I wonder if any of them mean quite what is meant by the recollection of the Place de la Concorde, flaunting the pomp and pride of France with shimmering fountains, white statues, and all the brave masses of foliage, whelmed in dazzling light.

There is one mood, there is one picture, in which, as it seems to me, better than in all the rest is the physiognomy of Rome to be ideally contemplated. That is when twilight falls, and, from beneath the trees on the terrace of the Villa Medici, one looks across the sea of palace roofs, and the ancient militant grandeur of the city is softened by an indescribable peace. We hear much of "sunny" Spain. Grenada on a day in June explains and justifies the phrase, but the streets of Madrid are never more characteristic, even in the summertime, than when the cutting wind comes down from the mountains and makes the sunny day seem bleak. Holland is radiant when the tulips are in bloom, but to feel in your blood the influence of all that Holland signifies you must explore its cities, and especially its smaller towns, under leaden skies, or stand on one of its beaches with the rain and wind whipping across your face, and watch the fishermen shouldering their boats through the angry surf. One might go on indefinitely, recalling cycles of atmospheric effects in this or that country, successions of episodes, all beautiful, but one of them invariably possessing the subtle spiritual quality in which the genius of place is summed up.

The genius of place, we are assured, is

threatened by the encroachments of modern progress. I wonder why it should be so. Old dwellers in Italy bemoan the losses that follow change, and in a measure they are right. The Piazza di San Marco can never be the same without its old Campanile. The architects may be never so faithful to the lines of the original tower in the construction of the new one, and still there will be a melancholy difference, which every traveller who has long known and loved his Venice will be bound to feel. The puffing steamboats on the Grand Canal scarcely atone by their usefulness for the incongruity of their presence in waters in which the gondola, or the sailing boat with its stained canvas, is as indispensable to the picture conceived by the poetical imagination as are the marble palace walls. The elevator which saves the tired, or the Philistine, from walking up the Scala di Spagna, is undoubtedly a trial to a certain order of temperament. Tramways everywhere in old Europe have a terribly disillusionizing effect. But let the rational being ask himself, with all honesty, how long that effect virtually lasts. It is gone almost as soon as it comes, and this, I believe, for the reason that, after all, it is humanity that counts. Not all the inventions in the world, not all the "modern improvements" that have proceeded from man's utilitarian ingenuity, can keep man from I eing to-day very like what he has always been. That is why the experienced traveller, fearful that if he does not make haste he will find picturesque Europe wiped out of existence, need not be in the least alarmed. You cannot change the social instincts that have had centuries in which to mature. You cannot change human nature and the light and air that have fixed, and will always fix, the character of the streets of the world.

By Oliver Herford

THE Red Rose mocked the Ivy Tree

That wound about the western tower: "Look you," she cried, "and learn of me To live and love and flower!"

"O Rose! O Red Rose, mock me not!" The Ivy answered. "Changeless Fate Shapeth for everyone his lot,

To love or toil or hate."

The Red Rose bloomed again, again,
And year by year with secret power
The Ivy wrought its fateful chain
About the western tower.

And now the crumbling battlement

Is crowned with green, the casement pane

Is hidden, and its bars are bent
Beneath the Ivy chain.

*

All night the Lady Hildegarde,
Fair prisoner of her kinsman's hate,
At the west casement, iron-barr'd,
Bemoans her evil fate.

When lo! from out the scented dark
A lute's faint voice comes up to her;
She strains against the bars to hark-
She feels the iron stir.

In her white hands, she knows not how
(Again the lute! this time more plain),
The bars are loosed-oh, Ivy, now
Your toil was not in vain!

The way is clear, the world is free,
Love lights the twisted ivy stair
For Hildegarde. O Red Rose, see
This Ivy blossom rare!

The Red Rose mocked the Ivy Tree;
And now upon her withered stem
The dull red ashes smoulder-see
How the wind scatters them.

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