The speaker found no truth in one of the popular reports, namely, that this strange man lived in great luxury and splendor. On the contrary, he lived in the plainest, simplest manner; played a game of cribbage with his maid, in the evening, and, when the church clock struck ten, went straight off to bed. It seems that while the belief of the people was, that this man kept up a correspondence with their earthly Lord, the King, noting all that went on, the speaker, in the monologue is aware that it was the Heavenly King with whom he corresponded. In the last paragraph of his monologue he expresses the wish that he might have looked in, yet had haply been afraid, when this man came to die, and seen, ministering to him, the heavenly attendants,-- “who line the clean gay garret sides, And stood about the neat low truckle-bed With the heavenly manner of relieving guard. Here had been, mark, the general-in-chief, Thro’ a whole campaign of the world’s life and death, Doing the King’s work all the dim day long, * * * * * And, now the day was won, relieved at once!” He then adds that there was “‘No further show or need of that old coat, You are sure, for one thing! Bless us, all the while How sprucely WE are dressed out, you and I!’” we who are so inferior to that divine poet; but, “A second, and the angels alter that.” “Transcendentalism”. A poem in twelve books. This monologue is addressed by a poet to a brother-poet whom he finds fault with for speaking naked thoughts instead of draping them in sights and sounds. If boys want images and melody, grown men, you think, want abstract thought. Far from it. The objects which throng our youth, we see and hear, quite as a matter of course. But what of it, if you could tell what they mean? The German Boehme, with his affinities for the abstract, never cared for plants until, one day, he noticed they could speak; that the daisy colloquized with the cowslip on SUCH themes! themes found extant in Jacob’s prose. But when life’s summer passes while reading prose in that tough book he wrote, getting some sense or other out of it, who helps, then, to repair our loss? Another Boehme, say you, with a tougher book and subtler abstract meanings of what roses say? Or some stout Mage like John of Halberstadt, who MADE THINGS Boehme WROTE THOUGHTS about? Ah, John’s the man for us! who instead of giving us the wise talk of roses, scatters all around us the roses themselves, pouring heaven into this shut house of life. So come, the harp back to your heart again, instead of speaking dry words across its strings. Your own boy-face bent over the finer chords, and following the cherub at the top that points to God with his paired half-moon wings, is a far better poem than your poem with all its naked thoughts. Apparent Failure.