the scholarly and the general reader by lack of perspective and of definition. Spenser and John Norris are mentioned in the same breath, despite the century of changing ideals between them. Henry More, an interesting man, but one of the most lamentable of poets, is made to bulk as large as Sidney; yet Joseph Beaumont, the 40,000 lines of whose Psyche was one vast fabric of Platonism, is not mentioned at all. Save in the preface, nothing is said of those Continental forces from which English Platonism can never be disentangled, and there is no account at all of any of those personal groups and influences on which the actual life of any Platonism has always depended. To a purely critical book the lack of definition is a more serious drawback. No clear distinction is made between the theoretical and almost systematic Platonism which appeared in the poetry of the period, and the more intimate Platonism of mood which has never been absent from the poetic temperament; nor is any line of cleavage laid down between Platonism proper, and Cabbalism, Cartesianism, Rosicrucianism, Catholic mysticism, and the hundred other isms too tedious to mention, which engaged the men of those moody and unquiet times. It is a pity that so much detraction must be made from an earnest book which contains many interesting poetical extracts, some pages of excellent expository writing, and a useful bibliography, yet it is important that persons having authority in such matters should consider the dangers which beset the belletristic student when he ventures upon the strange seas of philosophic thought. An interesting volume for collateral reading with Mr. Harrison's book is Mr. Cooke's anthology of Transcendental poetry. It is a workmanlike compilation made with information and taste. It 1 The Poets of Transcendentalism. Edited by GEORGE WILLIS COOKE. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1903 presents a striking racial embodiment of the Platonic mood in poetry, and offers some curious points of similarity and opposition to the specimens of Platonizing poetry furnished by Mr. Harrison. The Transcendental poets themselves would have disclaimed the analogy; for Platonism was but a drop in the vast bucket of their omniscience. They accepted the universe, and all one to them were "The grand and magnificent dreamers; Yet considering their poetry as a finished product, its spiritual sense of life its constant sense of the unity and sempiternity of beauty — makes it more comparable to the body of English Platonic poetry than to any similar body of verse in the world, not excepting the flights of the German Transcendental lyre. On the other hand, the racy, indigenous quality of the verse which Mr. Cooke has collected makes a difference as striking as the likeness. Where the typical Platonizing poem is florid with imagery drawn from the beauties of sky and meadow and the female sex, the typical Transcendental poem is as scrawny and pungent as a rock-rooted pine. Indeed, poetic Transcendentalism seems almost the cult of the pine; and there are few stanzas, and fewer poems, in Mr. Cooke's books, that do not allude to it. We hear a great many such ejaculations as this: "O tall old pine! O gloomy pine! That thrills so deep this heart of mine?" Yet there is as fine poetic impressiveness in the poet's suggestion that in the sighing of the pines he catches a sound of "The soul's unfathomable sea, The ocean of eternity," as in Vaughan's "I saw eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light." In both the English Platonics and the American Transcendentalists there was a growing tendency toward artificiality; the lesser men constantly tended to accept as mere current counters the phrases and images which the leaders had used to express real emotions and sincere thoughts. In the long run the Transcendentalists fall far behind the Platonists not only in the music and color of their verse, but in élan and suggestiveness as well. Yet when it becomes a question of which set of poets concealed the ink-horn more successfully the advantage goes the other way. The Platonist poets were largely young men in libraries or courts or taprooms, and most of them died young. The Transcendental poets were of both sexes; they seem, when out of the pulpit or parlor, to have been walking woodland roads. We discover from Mr. Cooke's biographical notes that few of them failed to weather threescore and ten, while many of them half a century after the flowering of their school - still survive at an even more advanced and honorable old age. F. G. Two Books England. WE do well to cherish the remains, whether recorded or legendabout New ary, of our Colonial phase. It is pleasant to feel that, with all our youthfulness as a nation, we have a local past of some venerableness. It did not express itself in any form of art, but we have ceased to take for granted on this account that Virginian life was all laxity and unintelligence, or Puritan life all primness and fanaticism. Fiction has done much of late to invest the Colonial period with a romantic glamour; but our new sense of its mellowness and completeness we owe rather to the diligence which keeps unearthing and classifying old chronicles, town records, legal documents, journals, and letters. To this useful order belong our two 1 The Romance of Old New England Churches. By MARY C. CRAWFORD. Boston: L. C. Page & Co. 1903. books.1 The reader who has an eye for such chronicles will remember Miss Crawford's recent Romance of Old New England Roof-Trees. It was a much less sentimental book than its title led one to suppose, a piece of simple, clear, readable annal-writing. The present book is of the same sort. In this case, also, the title fails to suggest the exact nature of the contents. The narrative concerns itself little with the history of churches, though here and there interesting data are presented in compact form, in connection, for instance, with King's Chapel, the Old South Church, Old Trinity, and other churches as old though less widely known. But the book will not be mainly acceptable for its data. The chapters, most of them, chronicle the varied lives of certain members of the old ecclesiastical aristocracy of New England. It is pleasant to note how much more satisfaction the writer takes in dealing with the experiences of Elizabeth Whitman or Esther Edwards or Samuel Sewall, than in recording the history of church organizations, sites, and edifices. Her treatment of these themes is historical rather than literary. She does not fail to suggest her interpretation of the incidents which she records, but her main purpose is to make the record; yet, as is not uncommonly the reward of such an effort, the literary quality of her work is the sounder for being less fanciful. Old Paths and Legends of New England is a much more bulky and compendious book. It is, indeed, a little too bulky and heavy to serve, as it might otherwise admirably serve, as a waybook for Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. The large number of illustrations are responsible for its size and weight; but they need not be ashamed of the responsibility. They are as good pictures as can be made by the reproduction of good photographs, and Old Paths and Legends of New England. By KATHARINE M. ABBOTT. New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1903. text. are really a valuable supplement to the Each chapter deals with some historic town, concisely, yet not mechanically, matters of guidebook information being relegated to a separate note under the heading “Landmarks." The text is spirited and intelligent. It contrives, in presenting many facts, to preserve their value in perspective, and, a more difficult thing, to suggest the emotion inherent in old places and structures which, only less convincingly than the written word, embody the past for us. A New Englander may harbor a prejudice against sightseeing and still be unable to lay down this book without an impulse to look up some of the ancient haunts, which, it reminds one, lie well within a Sabbath day's trolley of the home-spot. This is to say that the volume is particularly worth the care of the pilgrim from Chicago or Oklahoma who wishes to do the East and not be done by it. The reasonable and sympathetic spirit in which the author has undertaken her task is well suggested by the opening sentences of her Preface: "Once upon a time it might have been said, 'Who knows an American town?'. . . Some travellers thought we were too young to be interesting; others, in the words of the Old Play, directed their search to farthest Ind in search of novelties,' blinking owl-like at ten thousand objects of int'rest wonderful' before their very thresholds, and even the most indefatigable lovers of America became discouraged by difficulties in the way of travelling almost insurmountable. The American found it a far more simple affair to journey with the immortals from Loch Katrine to Mont Blanc than to follow the course of Whittier's Merrimack with its sheaf of legends from source to sea. To-day. . . our historyloving countryman, with his favorite volume in his pocket, may step down by the wayside from the wheel, the electric car, or automobile, and explore some little stream to the spot where the grist-mill's wheel turns still, and, in the hand-made nails of a primitive garrison, live over again, as it were, his great-great-greatgrandfather's experiences." With such a traveler this volume might well be a chosen favorite. It will not go into his pocket, but perhaps a lighter and more compact edition may follow. H. W. B. THE MEANING OF RHODE ISLAND.1 "THE meaning of Rhode Island" implies a problem, the solution of which is attempted in every comprehensive work on American history, but which still re 1 Rhode Island, its Making and its Meaning, 1636-1683. By IRVING BERDINE RICHMAN, with an Introduction by JAMES BRYCE. Two volumes. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1902. State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the End of the Century. A history [by CLARENCE SAUNDERS BRIGHAM] edited by EDWARD FIELD. Three volumes. Boston and Syracuse: Mason Publishing Company. 1902. mains a problem to those who are trying to understand the past and the present of this puzzling little commonwealth. The circumstances which led to the founding Correspondence of the Colonial Governors of Rhode Island, 1723-1775. Edited by GERTRUDE SELWYN KIMBALL, for the Colonial Dames of America in Rhode Island. Two volumes. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1902. Harris Papers [with an Introduction by IRVING B. RICHMAN and Notes by CLARENCE S. BRIGHAM. Collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society, X. Providence. 1902. of the colony, and the conditions under which it developed during the second quarter of the seventeenth century, were most exceptional. To no other American community were offered such opportunities for experimenting with the theories of democratic government, along the lines in which progress has been made toward freedom for the individual and power for the body politic. Bancroft, picturing the development of the nation with the eye of a painter seeking the general effect, and Charles Francis Adams, sketching the details with realistic accuracy, alike see in Rhode Island the original suggestion for more of the ideas which are embodied in the present scheme of government for the United States than in any other of its constituent parts. Such a reputation demands that the history of this state shall be made known, so as to reveal why these ideas originated there, how they were experimented with, and what led to their ultimate acceptance by the nation. The annals of Rhode Island's formative years have been set forth with abundance of detail, and their record shows clearly that the men who projected the first settlements on Narragansett Bay fully appreciated their opportunities. They deliberately prepared the foundations for a society in which the members might enjoy the utmost individual liberty in civil and social as well as in religious affairs. It is such a society as exists to-day, more than anywhere else, in the United States of America; which was made possible, and which was on the verge of coming into being, in the settlements at Providence and Aquidneck in 1640. The story of those two commu The Fourth Paper presented by Major Butler, with other Papers edited and published by Roger Williams in London, 1652. With an Introduction by CLARENCE SAUNDERS BRIGHAM. Providence: The Club for Colonial Reprints. 1903. The Early Records of the Town of Providence, Vol. XVII. Town Papers, 1682-1722. Providence Record Commissioners. 1903. The Early Records of the Town of Portsmouth, nities during the five years preceding that date is in many respects unsurpassed in interest or importance by any equal period of Colonial history. It has received from historical writers the attention it so fully merits. No community, however, and least of all an independent commonwealth, is entitled to be judged by a single half decade of its career. The friends of "Little Rhody" are far from asking for any such limitation of judgment. The temptation is nevertheless very strong for the historian to look at the succeeding years through the halo created by the ideas which dominated that formative period. Even Mr. Richman, searching for the truth with the broad outlook of a dweller on the prairies beyond the Mississippi, is carried by the impulse of the idyllic beginnings through half a century of rancorous squabblings over land and bloody altercations about cattle, of bitter theological recrimination and hypocritical neglect of social safeguards. Rhode Island's part in the making of the United States is less significant than is her contribution to the more important history of human society; and the meaning of this must be sought in the periods beginning where it would be more agreeable to leave the story of colony and state. Rhode Island has suffered because of the reputation given her by writers who have formed their opinions without taking into account two essential factors, — the development of similar ideas contemporaneously in other parts of the world, and the relation between what her people have said and what they have done. Roger Williams was in a remarkable degree, to quote Mr. Richman's admirable edited by the librarian of the Rhode Island Historical Society [C. S. BRIGHAM]. Providence, for the State. 1901. The Dorr War, or the Constitutional Struggle in Rhode Island. By ARTHUR MAY MOWRY. Providence Preston & Rounds. 1901. The Finances and Administration of Providence. By HOWARD KEMBLE STOKES. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. 1903. phrase, "the exponent in America of the time-spirit of Toleration." Mr. Brigham, the librarian of the state Historical Society, in his essay on a tract which Williams published in London in 1652, presents abundant evidence to prove that the founder of Rhode Island was one of a large company of Englishmen, undoubtedly well-nigh the foremost among them, with Milton and Cromwell and a score of others, who believed as thoroughly as he did in the right of all men to have their own opinions regarding the best way of worshiping God. The others realized, as Williams, despite his exceptional opportunities for observing the theory in practice, apparently never realized, that most people in 1650 were not sufficiently sure of their own opinions to disregard in every-day life the opinions of their neighbors. Roger Williams also failed to perceive that the Englishmen who joined him in settling Rhode Island were among those most deeply imbued with the "time-spirit," and that they, better than he, understood its full import. Mr. Richman shows with much skill that it was not Williams, but the general body of settlers, their ideas shaped by constant friction, who developed the practical conception of individual freedom for opinions regarding social and political, as well as religious matters. A great deal of gratitude is due to the founders of Rhode Island who put these ideas, which had been agitating men's minds all over Europe for a hundred years, to the test of actual experiment. The experience and the example of Rhode Island were kept constantly in mind by those who were responsible for the administration of the neighboring colonies, and they, and the nation which they founded, profited inestimably by the lessons taught by Rhode Island. It is surprising that Mr. Richman, keenly in touch as he is with contemporary tendencies in historical study, did not take advantage of his opportunity to VOL. XCIII. — NO. 555. 9 depart from the traditional notion that the ideas of the founders constitute the substance of Rhode Island's history. The theories practiced by Roger Williams and his fellow settlers make up an important chapter in the record of the evolution of religious, political, and social ideas. It is a chapter to which Mr. Richman contributes some noteworthy additions, chief of which is his explanation of what became of Williams, theologically, after his brief mental sojourn with the Baptists. The passages by which he is traced to the Seekers, a sect among whom he became a leader in the quest for something believable, are among the best in Mr. Richman's many brilliant pages. But the true meaning of Rhode Island, its important contribution to the history of institutions and of society, is to be found, not in these ideas, but in the use which has been made of them. Rhode Island had a start incomparably more favorable for the development of democratic institutions than any other of the communities out of which has grown this freest of republics. She has still a reputation for freedom in speech and action beyond any of her neighbors. It is, according to the repeated statements of the man whom the people of the state have elected to be their governor, the freedom which tends to license and libertinism. These statements, and the current daily news from Rhode Island, are curiously significant commentary upon two facts in her earliest history. Providence organized itself into a government absolutely without control, restraint, or guidance from beyond its own narrow limits, and such control as its neighbors undertook to impose was successfully rejected. Newport, organized under similar external conditions, began its career by selecting as its first governor one of the richest men of his time in English America. Students of society and of political organization are fairly entitled to information regarding the way in which the existing |