of some day mastering the
finest shades of nasality and cadence, the violet rays of rhythm.

* * *

Mr. Masefield, the poet, does not believe that war times nourish the
arts. The human brain does its best work, he says, when men are happy.
How perfectly true! Look at ancient Greece. She was continually at war,
and what did the Grecians do for art? A few poets, a few philosophers
and statesmen, a few sculptors, and the story is told. On the other
hand, look at England in Shakespeare's time. The English people were
inordinately happy, for there were no wars to depress them, barring a
few little tiffs with the French and the Spanish, and one or two
domestic brawls. The human brain does its best work when men are happy,
indeed. There was Dante, a cheery old party. But why multiply instances?

* * *

Having read a third of H. M. Tomlinson's "The Sea and the Jungle," we
pause to offer the uncritical opinion that this chap gets as good
seawater into his copy as Conrad, and that, in the item of English, he
can write rings around Joseph.

* * *

Like others who have traversed delectable landscapes and recorded their
impressions, in memory or in notebooks, we have tried to communicate to
other minds the "incommunicable thrill of things": a pleasant if
unsuccessful endeavor. When you are new at it, you ascribe your failure
to want of skill, but you come to realize that skill will not help you
very much. You will do well if you hold the reader's interest in your
narrative: you will not, except by accident, make him see the thing you
have seen, or experience the emotion you experienced.

* * *

So vivid a word painter as Tomlinson acknowledges that the chance
rewards which make travel worth while are seldom matters that a reader
would care to hear about, for they have no substance. "They are no
matter. They are untranslatable from the time and place. Such fair
things cannot be taken from the magic moment. They are not provender for
notebooks."

* * *

He quotes what the Indian said to the missionary who had been talking to
him of heaven. "Is it like the land of the musk-ox in summer, when the
mist is on the lakes, and the loon cries very often?" These lakes are
not charted, and the Indian heard the loon's call in his memory; but we
could not better describe the delectable lands through which we have
roamed. "When the mist is o