been plain to them at half a glance, and its scientific name would have replaced the vague designation of “waterfowl.”  Its life, habits and habitat winter and summer, would have unrolled before them, and the dogs-eared and rain-stained note-book sprung open for a new entry.  The poet, on the other hand, got happily home without injury to his health (for he is still hale half a century after the fact), lit the gas, nibbed the quill pen of the day, and sent down to us what must be confessed a pleasanter memorandum than we should have had from the forest-students.  These, brave and ardent fellows! have long been asleep beneath the birds.

Mr. Burroughs is half poet, half naturalist in his way of looking at Nature, and steers clear of the poetic vagueness in regard to species.  A passing description of the brown thrush as “skulking” among the bushes hits that bird to the life.  Some remarks on page 119 would seem to be applied by a slip of the pen to the crow blackbird, instead of the cowbird, which has always enjoyed the distinction of being the only American species that disposes of its offspring after the fashion of the cuckoo and Jean Jacques Rousseau.  The chapter on Emerson contains some acute remarks, but the warmest tribute to Emerson is the book itself, in which that writer’s influence is everywhere patent both in style and thought.  Mr. Burroughs has a happy facility of expression, and could well afford by this time to discard the Emersonian props and stand on his own merits.

The Life of Edgar Allan Poe.  By W.F.  Gill.  Illustrated.  New York:  Dillingham.

Griswold’s memoir of Poe has been actually beneficial to the reputation of its subject, contrary to its obvious design.  It has caused a thorough sifting of all accessible records of the poet’s short and dreary life, and elicited many reminiscences from men of mark who were in one way or another personally associated with him.  We know now, more certainly than we might have done but for Griswold’s effort to prove the opposite, that Poe was not expelled in disgrace from the University of Virginia, but bore himself well there as a student and a man; that he deliberately went to work and procured his being dropped from the rolls of West Point by building up with venial faults the requisite sum of “demerits,” after having repeatedly and in vain sought permission to withdraw from the control of a system of discipline so unsuited to his temperament; that, so far from being intemperate, a single glass of wine sufficed to bring on something like insanity; that, instead of neglecting his family, he devoted himself to them with a very rare exclusiveness, and wore down his health by watching at the bedside of his sick wife; that he was as faithful to his business as to his domestic obligations; and that, wholly disqualified for battling with the world, he managed to keep his necessarily troubled life at least unstained.  We know, moreover, that he did not appoint Griswold his literary executor, and that