A NEW MASTER OF ENGLISH PROSE 2$ 



Such perfume ! Such color! The senses respond to their objects; they grow exquisite 

 to a degree you cannot well conceive in your northern climate; and beauty pressing 

 in from without molds the spirit and mind insensibly to harmony with herself. 



To borrow from an old critic, anybody could write that except those who 

 have tried. But with our excerpts before us we feel most keenly that 

 they have utterly failed to convey any idea of the charm of the complete 

 works, and we fear we should feel the same even in the presence of the 

 better selection that any of our readers could have made. 



Of the various works we have mentioned, the Modern Symposium 

 seems to us the finest, although the others in their own way achieve an 

 excellence that need not fear comparison and will doubtless be preferred 

 by not a few readers. The scene of the masterpiece is laid on a Sussex 

 terrace in the month of June, and the dialogue, or rather the series of 

 monologues, lasts from the late evening hght to the dawn; but the 

 reader feels that there was never a flagging moment from the opening 

 speech of the comfortably discouraged Tory speaking appropriately 

 after a comfortable dinner, to the semi-oracular utterance of the poet- 

 philosopher speaking with even greater appropriateness while the glamor 

 of dawn passed into the clear light of morning. Every character is made 

 to speak in the language and style one feels inevitable. Indeed, one 

 could easily transfer the speakers from the printed page to their accus- 

 tomed walks of life, and in some cases could assign a definite name. 

 There is not a faulty word at any turn, nor the least suspicion of striving 

 for effect. The very transitions from character to character seem to 

 bind the parts together and disappear in their service. Seldom has art 

 been concealed more skilfully than in these pages, where Mr. Dickinson 

 is most himself. In many of his other writings one can put a hand on 

 this passage or that, and murmur Goethe, Landor, Pater; but ia this 

 work one feels strongly only the great master of them all, who wrote the 

 parent Symposium. And perhaps one could pay no greater tribute to 

 the contemporary Symposium than to say it is not unworthy to stand 

 beside the Platonic original. Of course, it falls far short of the older 

 dialogue in imaginative range — which is merely saying that it does not 

 attain the unattainable and ought not to be compared with the incom- 

 parable, for Plato's Symposium and Phcedrus still occupy a niche by 



