Upon the cards, like gouts of blood, Lie dinted hearts, and diamonds good, The red for faith and hardihood. In red the sacred blushes start On errand from a virgin heart, To win its glorious counterpart. The rose that makes the summer fair, The velvet robe that sovereigns wear The red revealment could not spare. And men who conquer deadly odds By fields of ice and raging floods, Take the red passion from the gods. Now Love is red, and Wisdom pale, But human hearts are faint and frail Till Love meets Love, and bids it hail. I see the chasm, yawning dread; I see the flaming arch o’erhead: I stake my life upon the red. This was my daring supplement, which appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly” (Contributors’ Club) for October, 1906. LA COULEUR “I stake my life upon the red!” With hair still golden on her head, Dame Julia of the Valley said. But Time for her has plans not told, And while her patient years unfold They yield the white and not the gold. Where Alpine summits loftiest lie, The brown, the green, the red pass by, And whitest top is next the sky. And now with meeker garb bedight, Dame Julia sings in loftier light, “I stake my life upon the white!” Turning to Mrs. Howe’s prose works, one finds something of the same obstruction, here and there, from excess of material. Her autobiography, entitled “Reminiscences,” might easily, in the hands of Mr. M. D. Conway, for instance, have been spread out into three or four interesting octavos; but in her more hurried grasp it is squeezed into one volume, where groups of delightful interviews with heroes at home and abroad are crowded into some single sentence. Her lectures are better arranged and less tantalizing, and it would be hard to find a book in American literature better worth reprinting and distributing than the little volume containing her two addresses on “Modern Society.” In wit, in wisdom, in anecdote, I know few books so racy. Next to it is the lecture “Is Polite Society Polite?” so keen and pungent that it is said a young man was once heard inquiring for Mrs. Howe after hearing it, in a country town, and when asked why he wished to see her, replied, “Well, I did put my brother in the poorhouse, and now that I have heard Mrs. Howe, I suppose that I must take him out.” In the large collection of essays comprised in the same volume with this, there are papers on Paris and on Greece which are full of the finest flavor of anecdote, sympathy, and memory, while here and there in all her books one meets with glimpses of Italy which remind one of that scene on the celebration of the birthday of Columbus, when she sat upon the platform of Faneuil Hall, the only woman, and gave forth sympathetic talk in her gracious way to the loving Italian audience, which gladly listened to their own sweet tongue from her.