new; and all the tragic elements of the book are almost equally ancient. Without the spacious vision which sees eternities in hours _His Family_ contents itself too much with being a document upon a particular hour of history. It has more kindliness than criticism. Mr. Poole, one hates to have to say, is frequently rather less than serious: he is earnest; at moments he is hardly better than merely solemn. Nevertheless, _The Harbor_ and _His Family_--_His Family_ easily the better of the two--are works of honest art and excellent documents upon a generation. Mr. Poole feels the earth reeling beneath the desperate feet of men; he sees the millions who are hopelessly bewildered; he hears the cries of rage and fear coming from those who foretell chaos; he catches the exaltation of those who imagine that after so long a shadow the sunshine of freedom and justice will shortly break upon them. With many generous expectations he waits for the revolution which shall begin the healing of the world's wounds. Meanwhile he paints the dissolving lineaments of the time in colors which his own softness keeps from being very stern or very deep but which are gentle and appealing. _Henry B. Fuller_ The peculiar strength and the peculiar weakness of Henry B. Fuller lie in his faithful habit of being a dilettante. A generation ago, when the aesthetic poets and critics were in bloom, Mr. Fuller in _The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani_ and _The Chatelaine of La Trinité_ played with sentimental pilgrimages in Italy or the Alps, packing his narratives with the most affectionate kind of archaeology and yet forever scrutinizing them with a Yankee smile. A little later, when Howells's followers had become more numerous, Mr. Fuller joined them with minute, accurate, amused representations of Chicago in _The Cliff-Dwellers_ and _With the Procession_. Then, as if bored with longer flights, he settled himself to writing sharp-eyed stories concerning the life of art as conducted in Chicago--_Under the Skylights_--and of Americans traveling in Europe--_From the Other Side, Waldo Trench and Others_. After _Spoon River Anthology_ Mr. Fuller took such hints from its method as he needed in the pungent dramatic sketches of _Lines Long and Short_. One of these sketches, called _Postponement_, has autobiography, it may be guessed, in its ironic, wistful record of a Midwestern American who all his life longed and planned to live in Europe but who found himself ready to gratify his desire only in the dread summer of 1914, when peace departed from the earth to stay away, he saw, at least as long as he could hope to live. There is the note of intimate experience, if not of autobiography, in these lucid words spoken about the hero of _On the Stairs_: "he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; he wanted to be a gentleman and hold himself in. An entangling, ruinous paradox."