The Real and Ideal in Literature. By Frank Preston Stearns.
(J. G. Cupples Company, Boston, ti.S.A.)—We have found the essays contained in this volume to be both rather hard and not very profitable reading, their intellectual pretentiousness, which is very marked, being in inverse ratio to their actual value. Mr. Stearns, whom we should imagine to be a young man, do( s not seem to understand how much is needed for the adequate equipment of a writer who aspires to say anything fresh and in- structive on such well.threshed-out themes as those which are treated in his papers, "Real and Ideal," "Classic and Romantic," and "The Modern Novel." The much less ambitious essay on "Emerson as a Poet" will not always carry conviction with it— we do not even understand what Mr. Stearns means when he says that Emerson wrote his poem on Art in "a metre of his own "- but it is more luminous and satisfactory than the studies to which the author evidently attaches greater importance. The bio- graphical sketch of the young and promising Yale graduate, Fred. W. Loring, is rendered attractive by its frank enthusiasm, but surely the remark, utterly unsupported by evidence, that Loring was "as a poet somewhat better than Matthew Arnold," is a very bad specimen of the jugement saugrenu.
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