Mr. Richard Halliburton's Glorious Adventure (Bles, illus- trated, 16s.) is
a curious combination of what the author, as an American, would call mighty pretty fooling, of a deep and a genuine love for poetry, a fine feeling for human achieve- ment, and the delicatest touch in depicting natural beauty— the yellows and blues and liquid sunlight of the Mediterranean. It is a modern Odyssey : really an Odyssey, for where Odysseus wandered, thither went Mr. Halliburton too—to Troy, to Lotus Land, to Circe's Island, to visit the Cyclops off Sicily, to listen to the soft sweet voices of the Sirens singing (unless it was the sound of water lapping on Capri rocks), and home at last to Ithaka, where the soft gray olive trees guard Odysseus' castle-site, while a scarlet sky enflames the western sea. Put in so many prosaic words, The Glorious Adventure is just an account of a tour in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the course of which the author " swam the Hellespont on a can of sardines," emulated Pheidippides over the Marathon course (with occasional refreshment at wine-shops en route), and played ball with Nausicaa at Corfu, substituting a lemon for Homer's golden ball. The book is a whimsy, but it is also a joy, and none but a man with the fine true instincts of a poet could have written it.
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