e of her books
I do not like. If you wish to know what Ouida really is, read
"Wanda," "The Dog of Flanders," "The Leaf in a Storm." In these
you will hear the beating of her heart.

Most of the novelists of our time write good stories. They are
ingenious, the characters are well drawn, but they lack life,
energy. They do not appear to act for themselves, impelled by
inner force. They seem to be pushed and pulled. The same may be
said of the poets. Tennyson belongs to the latter half of our
century. He was undoubtedly a great writer. He had no flame or
storm, no tidal wave, nothing volcanic. He never overflowed the
banks. He wrote nothing as intense, as noble and pathetic as the
"Prisoner of Chillon;" nothing as purely poetic as "The Skylark;"
nothing as perfect as the "Grecian Urn," and yet he was one of the
greatest of poets. Viewed from all sides he was far greater than
Shelley, far nobler than Keats. In a few poems Shelley reached
almost the perfect, but many are weak, feeble, fragmentary, almost
meaningless. So Keats in three poems reached a great height--in
"St. Agnes' Eve," "The Grecian Urn," and "The Nightingale"--but
most of his poetry is insipid, without thought, beauty or sincerity.

We have had some poets ourselves. Emerson wrote many poetic and
philosophic lines. He never violated any rule. He kept his passions
under control and generally "kept off the grass." But he uttered
some great and splendid truths and sowed countless seeds of
suggestion. When we remember that he came of a line of New England
preachers we are amazed at the breadth, the depth and the freedom
of his thought.

Walt Whitman wrote a few great poems, elemental, natural--poems
that seem to be a part of nature, ample as the sky, having the
rhythm of the tides, the swing of a planet.

Whitcomb Riley has written poems of hearth and home, of love and
labor worthy of Robert Burns. He is the sweetest, strongest singer
in our country and I do not know his equal in any land.

But when we compare the literature of the first half of this century
with that of the last, we are compelled to say that the last, taken
as a whole, is best. Think of the volumes that science has given
to the world. In the first half of this century, sermons, orthodox
sermons, were published and read. Now reading sermons is one of
the lost habits. Taken as a whole, the literature of the latter
half of our century is better than the first. I like