itled _Hauptstroemungen in der Litteratur des
Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts_. Barring the strictures which I have made, I
know no work of contemporary criticism which is more luminous in its
statements, more striking in its judgments, and more replete with
interesting information. It reminds one in its style of Taine's
"Lectures on Art" and the "History of English Literature." The
intellectual bias is kindred, if not the same; as is also the pictorial
vigor of the language, the subtle deductions of psychical from physical
facts, and a certain lusty realism, which lays hold of external nature
with a firm grip.

In Dr. Brandes's "Impressions of Poland" I found an observation which
illustrates his extraordinary power of characterization. The
temperament of the Polish people, he says, is not rational but
fantastically heroic. When I recall the personalities of the various
Poles I have known (and I have known a great many), I cannot conceive of
a phrase more exquisitely descriptive. It makes all your haphazard
knowledge about Poland significant and valuable by supplying you with a
key to its interpretation. It is this faculty Dr. Brandes has displayed
in an eminent degree in his many biographical and critical essays which
have appeared in German and Danish periodicals; as also in his more
elaborate biographies of Benjamin Disraeli (1878), Esaias Tegner (1878),
Soeren Kierkegaard (1877), Ferdinand Lassalle (1882), and Ludwig Holberg.
The first of these was translated into English, and was also published
in the United States. A second volume, entitled "Eminent Writers of the
Nineteenth Century," was translated some years ago by Professor R. B.
Anderson. The greater number of these highly finished essays were
selected from the Danish volumes "The Men of the New Transition" (1884)
and "Men and Works in Recent European Literature" (1883), and one or two
from "Danish Poets" (1877). They give in every instance the keynote to
the personality with which they deal; they are not so much studies of
books as studies of the men who are revealed in the books. Take, for
instance, the essay on Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson, which I regard as one of
the finest and most vital pieces of critical writing in recent times.
What can be more subtly descriptive of the very innermost soul of this
poet than the picture of him as the clansman, the Norse chieftain, who
feels with the many and speaks for the many; and what more beautifully
indicative of his external