world, perhaps no country ever offered less encouragement to the higher forms of art or the more thorough achievements of scholarship.  Even were it not so, it would be idle to expect us to produce any literature so peculiarly our own as was the natural growth of ages less communicative, less open to every breath of foreign influence.  Literature tends more and more to become a vast commonwealth, with no dividing lines of nationality.  Any more Cids, or Songs of Roland, or Nibelungens, or Kalewalas are out of the question,—­nay, anything at all like them; for the necessary insulation of race, of country, of religion, is impossible, even were it desirable.  Journalism, translation, criticism, and facility of intercourse tend continually more and more to make the thought and turn of expression in cultivated men identical all over the world.  Whether we like it or not, the costume of mind and body is gradually becoming of one cut.

W.D.  HOWELLS

VENETIAN LIFE

Those of our readers who watch with any interest the favorable omens of our literature from time to time, must have had their eyes drawn to short poems, remarkable for subtilty of sentiment and delicacy of expression, and bearing the hitherto unfamiliar name of Mr. Howells.  Such verses are not common anywhere; as the work of a young man they are very uncommon.  Youthful poets commonly begin by trying on various manners before they settle upon any single one that is prominently their own.  But what especially interested us in Mr. Howells was, that his writings were from the very first not merely tentative and preliminary, but had somewhat of the conscious security of matured style.  This is something which most poets arrive at through much tribulation.  It is something which has nothing to do with the measure of their intellectual powers or of their moral insight, but is the one quality which essentially distinguishes the artist from the mere man of genius.  Among the English poets of the last generation, Keats is the only one who early showed unmistakable signs of it, and developed it more and more fully until his untimely death.  Wordsworth, though in most respects a far profounder man, attained it only now and then, indeed only once perfectly,—­in his “Laodamia.”  Now, though it be undoubtedly true from one point of view that what a man has to say is of more importance than how he says it, and that modern criticism especially is more apt to be guided by its moral and even political sympathies than by aesthetic principles, it remains as true as ever that only those things have been said finally which have been said perfectly, and that this finished utterance is peculiarly the office of poetry, or of what, for want of some word as comprehensive as the German Dichtung, we are forced to call imaginative literature.  Indeed, it may be said that, in whatever kind of writing, it is style alone that is able to hold the attention of the world long.  Let a man be never so rich in thought, if he is clumsy in the expression of it, his sinking, like that of an old Spanish treasureship, will be hastened by the very weight of his bullion, and perhaps, after the lapse of a century, some lucky diver fishes up his ingots and makes a fortune out of him.