His creation shines through all his work, giving it beauty, truth, and power. We do not doubt that humanity will enshrine him among its immortals.

far afield and finally went to California, it was due to her insight and encouragement that he at last wrote for publication, and became acquainted with literary and scientific men of the day. In these volumes are many of Muir's early letters to Mrs. Carr, of the greatest poetic beauty. All are of remarkable interest to the general reader as well as to the student of his life.

Professor Badè was long a friend and fellow worker with John Muir in the Sierra Club of California. In critical situations they have stood firmly for the preservation of our finest scenery from commercial ruination. Eventually, all will realize that spiritual values are always of greater importance to mankind than are merely material considerations. Meanwhile, the privilege and the responsibility of this great service to present and future generations must rest upon such clear seeing prophets as Muir and his associates.

In many ways the great range of the Sierra Nevada is the most beautiful in America. Upon its sunlit, snowy heights and in its grand and songful canyons, the Creator has lavished such wealth of beauty that only the stonyhearted can fail to see His love for man. If one roams alone, or with congenial friend, amid this paradise, he will long to return again and again that his soul may grow young in such companionship. John Muir was instant in his recognition of this opportunity. His experience with man had been a hard one. With God in nature, he felt at home; and he joyfully abandoned all that man could offer, in order to make this sacred mountain temple his home. For years he rambled over the range, climbing its highest peaks, rejoicing by its glorious streams and falls, worshiping amid its unequaled forests, sleeping upon its carpets of heather, and ever praising God with all his soul. Into his books he has brought this abundant life and joy, which forever will guide the traveler to a true appreciation of the beautiful in nature.

A. Knopi

Drantame, B

Hleday, Pag

a willing worker, he was driven by them early and late, and he received many chastisements for the good of his soul. It was only by arising from one to three o'clock in the winter's cold, that he secured the time to study and to develop his interesting mechanical inventions. Later at college he became absorbed in

Muir's adoration of nature was enhanced by the closest scientific study of tree and plant and flower. He was especially the friend of glaciers, revealing their agelong, beauty-creating work to a skeptical world. He won the attention of the nation to our incompa

The Peasants:

Bike-Mert C

The Backle Lady

George H. Duran Co

a professor. When Muir wandered

regions. For their recognition and pro

officially he remarked, "Why should I help Ibáñez? I don't want to give him that much added publicity." So journalism went empty, and the court went on with its business, dressed in tweeds, sitting at mahogany desks, mining, investing, building roads and schools, and fighting that desultory war in the Rif.

"So often," writes Ibáñez on page nine, "after those sleepless nights, as I watched the sun rise on one of the loveliest scenes of the Côte d'Azur, I would feel a sharp twinge of remorse, as though I had committed an evil deed

I had said nothing!" But now he has said it, so he must feel better. Only it is the belief of some of us that he has done a grave injustice to a great man. Perhaps it is ridiculous that an American should be so troubled by it or should take pains to deny it; yet I have been in Spain, I think, since Ibáñez has, and undoubtedly I shall return before him! They have a military censorship there just as we had during the war, and a law against sedition.

The writer has made his attack curiously personal, as if he carried about with him a hatred of the man greater than of the king. He decries the ath

spect even as a work of fiction. "Alphonso's Ambitions" and "Alphonso's Accomplice" as chapter headings are sufficiently childishly malignant to inspire a reviewer to reply in kind. It is a grateful thought that they can do the monarch little harm.

"Alfonso?" exclaimed Ambassador Moore one day in Madrid. "Why, if there were ever a revolution and a republic, he would be instantly elected president!"

Zuloaga, a great painter and a greater patriot, stands for the public mind in Spain; he is happy, he wants to see no change. To illustrate his point he waved his long arms and declaimed:

"Send your tourists and business people to Madrid and to Barcelona where there is no grass! I should like to put fleas in all the trains so that nobody would come to disturb us! Why, in my beloved Segovia they even ha a hotel with a bath!"

Alfonso XIII Unmasked, The Man
Terror in Spain. By Vicente
Ibáñez. Translated by Tex ongley.
E. P. Dutton and Compary.

so's younger days, forgetting entirely the fact that at seventeen a delicate boy found himself a king, and more, a ruler; and that his wise mother drove him to sport to strengthen him for the labor. Subtly, Ibáñez indicates that the court is vague in morals, neglecting to mention that any breach of law or rule among members of the court circle results in the permanent ostracism of both the man and the woman.

It is impossible, in what purports to be a book review, to make a refutation of all the matter in a book; yet Ibáñez's new publication is, for all its heralding, only a brochure; it commands no re

His creation shines through all his work, giving it beauty, truth, and power. We do not doubt that humanity will enshrine him among its immortals.

Professor Badè was long a friend and fellow worker with John Muir in the Sierra Club of California. In critical situations they have stood firmly for the preservation of our finest scenery from commercial ruination. Eventually, all will realize that spiritual values are always of greater importance to mankind than are merely material considerations. Meanwhile, the privilege and the responsibility of this great service to present and future generations must rest upon such clear seeing prophets as Muir and his associates.

With an almost religious fervor, Professor Badè has for years collected the incidents and letters that cover many little known portions of Muir's life; and he has now sympathetically woven them into these eagerly awaited biographical volumes. Their literary quality is of high order, and all lovers of Muir's work are indebted to their compiler. There should be strong public demand for early publication of all the remaining material.

Early in Muir's life, his parents moved from Scotland to a farm in Wisconsin. Concerned with the stern realities of an ancient theology, they failed completely to understand the divine possibilities in their son. Though

a willing worker, he was driven by them early and late, and he received many chastisements for the good of his soul. It was only by arising from one to three o'clock in the winter's cold, that he secured the time to study and to develop his interesting mechanical inventions. Later at college he became absorbed in botany, and found an understanding friend in Mrs. Jeanne C. Carr, the wife of a professor. When Muir wandered

far afield and finally went to California, it was due to her insight and encouragement that he at last wrote for publication, and became acquainted with literary and scientific men of the day. In these volumes are many of Muir's early letters to Mrs. Carr, of the greatest poetic beauty. All are of remarkable interest to the general reader as well as to the student of his life.

In many ways the great range of the Sierra Nevada is the most beautiful in America. Upon its sunlit, snowy heights and in its grand and songful canyons, the Creator has lavished such wealth of beauty that only the stonyhearted can fail to see His love for man. If one roams alone, or with congenial friend, amid this paradise, he will long to return again and again that his soul may grow young in such companionship. John Muir was instant in his recognition of this opportunity. His experience with man had been a hard one. With God in nature, he felt at home; and he joyfully abandoned all that man could offer, in order to make this sacred mountain temple his home. For years he rambled over the range, climbing its highest peaks, rejoicing by its glorious streams and falls, worshiping amid its unequaled forests, sleeping upon its carpets of heather, and ever praising God with all his soul. Into his books he has brought this abundant life and joy, which forever will guide the traveler to a true appreciation of the beautiful in nature.

Muir's adoration of nature was enhanced by the closest scientific study of tree and plant and flower. He was especially the friend of glaciers, revealing their agelong, beauty-creating work to a skeptical world. He won the attention of the nation to our incomparable Yosemite, and to the supreme grandeur of the Kings and Kern river regions. For their recognition and pro

tection his highest powers were enlisted, and in his noble effort to save the exquisite Hetch Hetchy Valley for the nation, he hesitated not to sacrifice his own life. As yet, his service to humanity has hardly been measured. His love for the beautiful was unsurpassed, and he worked untiringly with voice and with pen everywhere to awaken the hearts of men. Much remains for those to accomplish who glimpse his vision. The battle for the preservation of the Kings and the Kern has yet to be won with Congress; but no one, alive to his Maker, who has seen their wonders can doubt that they are among the most precious treasures that God has entrusted to man. If California calls you, journey with John Muir before you enter its portals. His vision is true, and his spirit will reward you!

The Life and Letters of John Muir. By William Frederic Badè. Houghton Mifflin Company.

IT

VARIEGATED MEMOIRS

By Herbert S. Gorman

T is surprising to note how few adequate autobiographies there are in the world. Outside of such achievements as "The Education of Henry Adams", and the self depictions of Prince Kropotkin, Marie Bashkirtseff, Benjamin Franklin, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Amiel, and John Stuart Mill, there are not many that do not present insurmountable obstacles to the claim of greatness. Sometimes the fault is a suspicion of fictionalization, as in Casanova and Benvenuto Cellini; more often it is a frank inadequacy. The man or woman cannot rise to his or her authentic personality with that rare insight and impartiality that postulates

real autobiography. After all, an autobiography is a great betrayal and few people are sufficiently intellectualized to realize the importance of betrayals. Yet autobiographies continue to be written. Season after season they are published, and the preponderance appear to be sops to the author's pride or obvious gestures for notoriety or an overweening sense of importance. Curiously enough, the four books that occasion these lines enter none of these categories. While it is true that none of them is a great autobiography in the definitive sense of the word, yet all of them are extremely entertaining revelations. They mirror forth personalities with a sufficient capture of reality to engross the reader with life. Consider their source. They come respectively from a poet, an artist, a radical propagandist, and a pugilist. The poles could not be farther apart and the only unity to be noted is the evident determination of each man to be himself, to realize himself fully and in spite of those difficulties that thrust themselves so objectionably into one's progress through this shadowy terrain that we call living. It is needless to state that Messrs. Kreymborg, Fuchs, Herzen, and Corbett have actually lived, have time after time been face to face with those objectives for which, rightly or wrongly, they imagined their mental, spiritual, and organic functionings were created.

Alfred Kreymborg calls his book "Troubadour". It is a wise and pertinent title, for he has passed through life for some forty years making melodies. With the inborn sensitivity of the poet he progressed from his father's tobacco shop, through years of dull livelihood touched to magic only by music, to that early Greenwich Village that existed before rents went up, tea rooms refused to chalk up

dinners, visitors from Oshkosh and points west descended like the Biblical plagues, and magazines for the select and little theatre movements were in their toddling infancies. In a way "Troubadour" is a history of the rise of the Village and its eventual downfall through an influx of charlatans. Mr. Kreymborg writes graciously and with a sagacious eye. He looks back upon his life and he sees a struggle that apparently has no end, but he appears to relish much of it. And because he does relish it so the reader is bound to be carried swiftly along on this amusing and sprightly river of self revelation. There is an historical note in this book, for the author played no small part in that awakening of America to the new forms in poetry that is now an old story. After all, it was due to him that that rare and long senescent magazine "Others" introduced such writers as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and a dozen more to a public that noted them with skeptical eyes and lifted eyebrows. Mr. Kreymborg appears to have been a doughty champion of lost causes. He was a sort of poetical Don Quixote riding doggedly across fields that barely sensed the hoofs of his horse. In fact, he was an inveterate experimenter with projects that any wise man who had observed America in those days would have informed him were decidedly due to fail. Possibly he knew this. Possibly he was mad enough to hold to his standard in the face of ridicule. Anyway, the reader will observe a consistency in his progress that may be noted of few writers in this country. He staked his career time and again upon dubious chances, and while in the eyes of many he may seem to have failed in vindicating his existence, there is a sufficient audience to encourage him in the road he has taken.

It would be interesting, if space permitted, to go rather intensively into "Troubadour" and point out its importance as an addition to the literary history of modern America. Many of the names and personages noted and neatly described in these pages have won their spurs, and still others are yet to reach that acceptance that must justify them in the eyes of the world. It would also be interesting to analyze Mr. Kreymborg himself. For the most part he has written of himself objectively, although there are portions of "Troubadour" wherein he sets down comment on himself that is exceedingly apt and important. The impression that a general reader gets is that of a kindly whimsical soul striving doggedly and yet somewhat shyly toward a goal that was for a time a little uncertain to the poet himself. He experienced the tug but was not quite aware of the direction. And together with this self revelation and historical significance go the virtues of dozens of tiny valuable vignettes of aspects of the New York before the war, the New York of Third Avenue in the Nineties, of combats in chess clubs (for Mr. Kreymborg was, and is, an expert chess player), of magazine ventures, lecture tours, foreign excursions (this last after the war, by the way), of the struggle and Bohemian insouciance of the man who will write poetry in spite of all obstacles. There is much that is peculiarly brave and admirable in "Troubadour"; and because it displays so well that high courage of the singer who walks blithely through an endless series of adversities, there is ample reason for it to be read, studied, and digested. In no other way can one find so much set down about the birth of the poetic renascence in America.

Emil Fuchs's "With Pencil, Brush,