poet who can perpetrate the
following:

Thou art my love,
And thou art the beard
On another man's face--
Woe is me.

Thou art my love,
And thou art a temple,
And in this temple is an altar,
And on this temple is my heart--
Woe is me.

Thou art my love,
And thou art a wretch.
Let these sacred love-lies choke thee.
For I am come to where I know your lies as truth
And your truth as lies--
Woe is me.

Now, if you please, is the object of these verses animal, mineral or
vegetable? Is the expression, "Thou art the beard on another man's
face," intended as a figure, or was it written by a barber?
Certainly, after reading this, "Simple Simon" is a ballade of
perfect form, and "Jack and Jill" or "Hickity, Pickity, My Black
Hen," are exquisite lyrics. But of the following what shall be said:

Now let me crunch you
With full weight of affrighted love.
I doubted you
--I doubted you--
And in this short doubting
My love grew like a genie
For my further undoing.

Beware of my friends,
Be not in speech too civil,
For in all courtesy
My weak heart sees specters,
Mists of desire
Arising from the lips of my chosen;
Be not civil.

This is somewhat more lucid as evincing the bard's exquisite
sensitiveness:

Ah, God, the way your little finger moved
As you thrust a bare arm backward.
And made play with your hair
And a comb, a silly gilt comb
--Ah, God, that I should suffer
Because of the way a little finger moved.

Mr. Crane's verselets are illustrated by some Bradley pictures,
which are badly drawn, in bad taste, and come with bad grace. On
page 33 of the book there are just two lines which seem to
completely sum up the efforts of both poet and artist:

"My good friend," said a learned bystander,
"Your operations are mad."

Yet this fellow Crane has written short stories equal to
some of Maupassant's.

_Pittsburg Leader_, June 3, 1899

After reading such a delightful newspaper story as Mr. Frank Norris'
"Blix," it is with assorted sensations of pain and discomfort that
one closes the covers of another newspaper novel, "Active Service,"
by Stephen Crane. If one happens to have some trifling regard for
pure English, he does not come forth from the reading of this novel
unscathed. The hero of this lurid tale is a newspaper man, and he
edits the Sunday edition of the New York "Eclipse," and delights in