compared to the "Fanfare of the Rhine," and the brook widens out as it flows, a smooth current, not very rapid, but flowing always, turning sometimes east, sometimes west, winding, disappearing at last mysteriously like a river.

In "Evelyn Innes" and "Sister Teresa," there are references to many different kinds of music, for the opera-singer's father is an organist in a church that gathers large crowds to hear the sixteenth-century contrapuntalists. She plays the viola da gamba at her father's concerts, but descriptions of madrigals and operas cannot be accepted as proof that the author's style was modified by musical interests. "Evelyn Innes" is externally musical as "Carmen" is externally Spanish; but the writing of "The Lake" would not be as it is if I had not listened to "Lohengrin" many times; and if any of the readers of the "Chesterian" have looked into my story, I think they will catch my meaning when I say that the pages in which an agitated priest wanders about a summer lake recall the silver of the prelude. The sun shining on the mist, a voice is heard in vibrant supplication, is the essence of the prelude; and thinking of how great was my gain, I fall to thinking that the twentieth-century artist stultifies himself when he shuts himself up in his own art, and that our present poets and story-tellers should spend more time in our National Galleries, not, I hasten to say, with a view of imitating D'An

When I am all alone, Envy me most,

nunzio, the flying man, who includes descriptions of Veronese and Tintoretto in all he writes. Such externalities as D'Annunzio's are worthless, for the reader feels that he is reading "eloquent padding," no doubt, but if he be an intelligent reader, his meditations end on the words, "there is no such thing as good; all 'padding' is bad, no matter whence it comes. If he be right,—and who shall say he is not?-it would seem that visits to the National Gallery should be undertaken with the view of enabling him to see the external world more clearly. Of course, there is a danger in these visits. The poet may return as Tennyson did with a commonplace image

"...till the hull

Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn."

We will hope, however, that he may escape the obvious and return with a finer sense of color and with a keener insight into nature than he had before, his mind charged-shall we say?-with the idyllic grace of a high birch overhanging a still lake or an appreciation of the melancholy, almost hostile, aspect of a rough wood in which woodmen are felling trees on each side of a ravine. Reubens, I would have the reader remember, did not play the organ himself, but an organist played while the master painted; and who shall say that some of the tumult of the organ does not survive in the painting?

Then my thoughts flutter round me In a glimmering host.

Some dressed in silver,

Some dressed in white,

Each like a taper

Blossoming light.

Most of them merry, Some of them grave, Each of them lithe

As willows that wave.

Some bearing violets, Some bearing bay; One with a burning rose Hidden away.