SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
Votive is this MUM, doer not useessarily preclude eitespisot nasal Poems. By Alan Seeger. (Constable and Co. 5s. not.)—Alan Seeger, a young Harvard man living in Paris when the war broke out, joined the Foreign Legion with other Americans, end was killed on the Somme last summer. Ho had written a good dont of pleasant verse before the war, but there ho more earnestness and more originality in the poems which he wrote in the trenches. We agree with Mr. William Archer, wino contributes ass interesting and not too critical Introduction, that Seeger's hest work, completed in two days while ho was in the firing-line, was his " Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France," which he was to have read on Decoration Day, 1916, before the statues of Lafayette and ll'ashington in Paris. This has piece came from his heart, not from his head, rand its pride and indignation were sincere. The poet did not foresee, when ho wrote of his dead comrades- " Double your glory is who perished thus, For you have died for Franco and vindicated us "-
that before another Decoration Day rams round America as is whole would have joined in the " war where Freedom was at stake."
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