ld Days and the New_,
recently issued. Of the latter, the poet Stoddard says: "Beyond all
the women of the Victorian era, she is the most of an Elizabethan....
She has tracked the ocean journeyings of Drake, Raleigh, and
Frobisher, and others to whom the Spanish main was a second home,
the _El Dorado_ of which Columbus and his followers dreamed in their
stormy slumbers.... The first of her poems in this volume, _Rosamund_,
is a masterly battle idyl."

Her books have had large sale, both here and in Europe. It is stated
that in this country one hundred thousand of her _Poems_ have been
sold, and half that number of her prose works.

Miss Ingelow has not been elated by her deserved success. She has
told the world very little of herself in her books. She once wrote a
friend: "I am far from agreeing with you 'that it is rather too bad
when we read people's works, if they won't let us know anything about
themselves.' I consider that an author should, during life, be as much
as possible, impersonal. I never import myself into my writings, and
am much better pleased that others should feel an interest in me,
and wish to know something of me, than that they should complain of
egotism."

It is said that the last of her _Songs with Preludes_ refers to a
brother who lies buried in Australia:--

"I stand on the bridge where last we stood
When delicate leaves were young;
The children called us from yonder wood,
While a mated blackbird sung.

* * * * *

"But if all loved, as the few can love,
This world would seldom be well;
And who need wish, if he dwells above,
For a deep, a long death-knell?

"There are four or five, who, passing this place,
While they live will name me yet;
And when I am gone will think on my face,
And feel a kind of regret."

With all her literary work, she does not forget to do good personally.
At one time she instituted a "copyright dinner," at her own expense,
which she thus described to a friend: "I have set up a dinner-table
for the sick poor, or rather, for such persons as are just out of the
hospitals, and are hungry, and yet not strong enough to work. We have
about twelve to dinner three times a week, and hope to continue the
plan. It is such a comfort to see the good it does. I find it one of
the great pleasures of writing, that it gives me more command of money
for such purposes than falls to the lot of most women