VICTORIAN POETS.

With Topical Analysis in margin, and full Analytical Index. Twenty-first Edition. Revised and extended, by a Supplementary Chapter, to the Fiftieth Year of the Period under Review. Crown 8vo, $2.25; half calf, $3.50.

The leading poets included in Mr. Stedman's survey are Tennyson, Landor, the Brownings, Hood, Arnold, "Barry Cornwall," Buchanan, Morris, Swinburne, and Rossetti. It also embraces very fully the minor poets and schools of the period, and with its copious notes and index forms a complete guide-book to the poetry of the Victorian era.

AMERICAN CRITICISMS.

The new chapter which Mr. Stednian has added to his "Victorian Poets" reviews the product of the past twelve years, thus bringing the English record down to even date with the "Poets of America," and making the two books more exactly the companions and complements of each other. The fresh material, which comprises about seventy pages, is devoted in a large measure to the examination of present poetical tendencies, and this is necessarily illustrated with mention of a great number of minor poets, - so many that we have a nearly exhaustive record of those entitled even to passing attention. Such a catalogue, pointed by quick touches of criticism, is of high value in defining the literary movement, and has no relation to any excessive estimate of the real value of the current poetical work. . . . We close the book with renewed admiration of the masterly handling of a fascinating but difficult subject, and with the gratification of knowing that America has produced the best book yet written on the English poetry of this age. — New York Tribune.

erature.

This delightful book. . . Among the best examples of criticism in our litWe ought, in justice to its encyclopedic character, to state that it contains notices, more or less extended, of every poet of any pretensions who has flourished in England since 1835; and that these notices are not simply critical, but also biographical, those incidents and influences in the lives of the subjects which may be supposed to have had a moulding influence upon them being made prominent. The book is thus a handbook to the poets and poetry of the period. - Hartford Courant.

The work is as admirable in form as it is skillful in method. Biography, analysis, and criticism constitute the threefold direction in which Mr. Stedman has expended his thought. In all the field he shows himself thoroughly at home, a familiar friend as it were of the men and women of whose characters and lives he writes, an intelligent student of their writings, and an appreciative though discriminating critic of their qualities. The Congregationalist (Boston).

With its companion volume, “Poets of America,” it is an example of a very high if not the highest kind of criticism. While giving the best studies of individuals and schools, it yet goes beyond the individual and school, and treats the art of poetry in the most comprehensive way. It suggests to us that as modern historians have made a vast improvement in the writing of State history, in a somewhat similar way Mr. Stedman has improved on former methods of criticism. - The New Englander.

Like all really good work of the sort, it cannot be made known to the reader except in the author's ipsissima verba. We can only counsel our friends to read for themselves, and tell them that they will find store of delights in the matured and thoughtful exposition of a scholar and man of letters, who understands his business thoroughly, and is constrained neither by fear nor favor to say the thing he does not feel. — The Churchman (New York).

One of the most thorough, workman-like, and artistic pieces of real critical writing that we have in English. For the period covered by it, it is the most comprehensive, profound, and lucid literary exposition that has appeared in this country or elsewhere. — Prof. MOSES COIT TYLER, Cornell University.

Mr. Stedman's volume is not merely good, but it presents the best view of the poets of the present generation in England that is anywhere to be had. ARTHUR GILMAN.

ENGLISH CRITICISMS.

We ought to be thankful to those who write with competent skill and understanding, with honesty of purpose, and with diligence and thoroughness of execution. And Mr. Stedman, having chosen to work in this line, deserves the thanks of English scholars by these qualities and by something more. He is faithful, studious, and discerning; of a sane and reasonable temper, and in the main a judicial one; his judgment is disciplined and exercised, and his decisions, even when we cannot agree with them, are based on intelligent grounds. The Saturday Review (London).

There is none among ourselves who equals him in breadth of sympathy, or in ability to resist allurement by the will-o'-the-wisp of mere form. It is because Mr. Stedman strenuously endeavors to maintain his position on a truer foundation that his history of poetry in the Victorian epoch is so valuable. . . . Not only the best book of its kind, but worth (say) fifty reams of ordinary anonymous criticism of home production. - WILLIAM SHARP, in The Academy (London).

He has undertaken a wide subject, and has treated it with great ability and competent knowledge. The Spectator (London).

The book is generous and enlightened, and bears the stamp of unfailing honesty. The Academy (London).

POETS OF AMERICA.

With full Notes in margin, and careful Analytical Index. By EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN, author of "Victorian Poets," etc. Eleventh Edition. 12mo, $2.25; half calf, $3.50.

CONTENTS: Early and Recent Conditions; Growth of the American School; William Cullen Bryant; John Greenleaf Whittier; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Edgar Allan Poe; Oliver Wendell Holmes; James Russell Lowell; Walt Whitman; Bayard Taylor; The Outlook.

AMERICAN CRITICISMS.

The appearance of this book is a notable event in American letters. No such thorough and conscientious study of the tendencies and qualities of our poetry has been attempted before, nor has any volume of purely literary criticism been written in this country upon so broad and noble a plan and with such ample power. . . . Mr. Stedman's work stands quite alone; it has had no predecessor, and it leaves room for no rival. — New York Tribune.

It is indeed refreshing to come upon a volume so devoid of the limitations of current criticism, so wholesome, so sane, so perceptive, so just, and so vivifying as we find in this collection of essays on the "Poets of America."... The volume may indeed be regarded as epoch-making. Its influence on our national literature is likely to be both deep and lasting. — The Literary World (Boston).

Mr. Stedman's temperament, training, and experience eminently fit him for the execution of a critical work on the poets of America, or, indeed, the poets of any land. He has ingrained honesty, breadth of apprehension, versatile sympathies, exact knowledge, and withal he is a poet with a poet's passion for beauty and love of song; and so he is a wise critic, a candid and luminous interpreter of the many-voiced muse. The candor, sincerity, and sympathetic spirit in which Mr. Stedman treats the many themes that come under review in connection with the poets included in his scheme are apparent all through the treatise. - The Dial (Chicago).

Such a work involves many kinds of talent, great patience, and ample scholarship; above all, it involves genius, and if the quality of this book were to be summed up in a single word, this one pregnant word comes first to mind, and remains after fullest reflection. . . As a body of criticism this volume stands alone in our literature, and is not likely soon to have a companion; it justifies and permanently establishes a reputation in this field already deeply grounded. It gives our criticism a standard at once exacting and catholic, and it restates, by way of commentary on our own poetry, the great underlying laws of verse. It is criticism of a kind which only poetic minds produce. - Christian Union (New York).

Mr. Stedman brings to the task an unusual familiarity with the whole of our literature, unusual acquaintance with the tools of the poetical guild, and a very keen notion as to how those tools have been used abroad as well as at home.

The studies themselves are admirable. They show a conscience which takes in good work, and, at the same time, considers the humanities,—which remembers what is due to art, and what must be granted to human frailty.The Critic (New York).

The book is one which the student and lover of poetry cannot deny himself. - Christian Register (Boston).

It will not be possible for any sensitive reader of the poets of America to forget that Mr. Stedman is also a poet; but it will be equally impossible for such a reader to regret it. The solid qualities of the book are the result of patient, conscientious, scholarly work, which shows on almost every page; its finer qualities, the delicate touch of sympathy, the glow of hope, the spiritual magnetism, are the fruit of the poetic temperament which no amount of industry can ever cultivate unless it first has the seed. The New Princeton Review.

A true critical insight enables Mr. Stedman to deal with his subject in a generous and a noble spirit, and yet in one that is eminently just and faithful to fact. His critical gifts are of a kind rarely to be found in this country, and none are more needed in our literature at the present time. — Unitarian Re

view.

This book should quickly become a standard wherever cultivated persons desire an honest, sympathetic, suggestive, entertaining, and experienced guide to the most interesting epoch of American literature. The Independent.

...

We are greatly indebted to Mr. Stedman for this fine example of what literary criticism should be. No one not himself a poet, and a poet with a noble spirit, could have written this book. — THOMAS S. HASTINGS, D. D., in The Presbyterian Review.

This is the history of American poetry; it is conceived and executed in the grand style of literary criticism, and it does not fall below its promise. — GEO. E. WOODBERRY, in The Atlantic Monthly.

FOREIGN CRITICISMS.

In his "Poets of America" Mr. Stedman displays the same competent skill, honesty of purpose, and painstaking thoroughness of execution [as in his work on 66 Victorian Poets"]; and he adds to these qualities the great advantage of being on his native soil. To the students of American verse his volume is almost indispensable. . . Every one will not agree with his conclusions; but no one can differ from so well-informed and conscientious a critic without self-distrust. The Quarterly Review (London).

This book, with its few and only superficial defects, and with its many solid merits, is one which most persons of taste and culture will like to possess. The Saturday Review (London).

Mr. Stedman deserves thanks for having devoted his profound erudition and the high impartiality of which he is capable, to making us acquainted with the literature of poetry as it has existed from the beginning in his country. His important and thorough study is conducted with the method, the scrupulousness, the perspicacity, which he applied formerly to the work of the Victorian Poets. La Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris).