The August number of the Atlantic Monthly is an exceptionally
strong one. It is worth reading for Mr. Russell Lowell's poem alone, of "How I Consulted the Oracle of the Goldfishes," with such lines as :— " In your pent lives, as we in ours, Have you surmises dim of powers, Of presences obscurely shown, Of lives a riddle to your own, Just on the senses' outer verge,
Where sense-nerves into soul-nerves merge ? "
But besides Mr. Lowell's poem, there are several articles on subjects of different kinds which are greatly above the average of magazine writing, such as "The Background of Roman History," "The French Alliance and the Conway Cabal," and "A Poet of French Canada.". It is hardly too much to say that, in the last, M. Paul Lafleur discovers, so far as the genera/ Anglo-American public is concerned, M. Frechette, a poet, who besides being the first landmark in the history of Canadian literature, deserves to be read on account of his own merits. There is at present running in the Atlantic Monthly a very power- ful story, "The Begum's Daughter," by Mr. Edwin Lassetter Bynner, a writer with whose name we are not familiar. In our
opinion, it is superior, from the literary point of view, even to Mr. Henry James's somewhat unpleasant "The Tragic Muse," ingenious though it is, as a matter of course. But is not the At/antic ifontlay, as a magazine intended for readers on this side of the Atlantic as well as on the other, too exclusively American ?
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