road that leads to enduring success, the only goal worth striving for in the domain of letters. I am well aware that in the popular list of women-writers mouthed by the growing herd of flippant readers that have no other use for a book than as a time-killer,—a herd to whom ideas are as unpalatable as disestablishment to an English parson—you will fail to find the name of Katherine Conway. The reason is simple. She has no fads to air in ungrammatical English, no fallacies to adduce in halting metre. It was a Boston critic who echoed the dictum of the French critic—that grammar has no place in the world of letters. Only have ideas, that is, write meaningless platitudes, grandiose nothings, something that neither man, the angels above nor the demons down under the sea, may decipher, and this illusive verbiage will make you famous. A school of critics will herald your work with such adjectives as “noble, lofty, absorbing, soul-inspiring;” nay, more, a pious missionary friend may be found to to translate the verbiage into Syriac, as a present for converts. Borne on the tide of such criticism, not a few women writers have mistaken the plaudits of notoriety, that passing show, for fame. It was a saying of De Musset’s that fame was a tardy plant, a lover of the soil. Be this as it may, it is safe to assert that its coming is not proclaimed by far-fetched similes, frantic metaphors, sensuous images, ranting style, ignorance of metre, want of grammar; the dishes are not of the voluptuous, morbid or the monstrous kind. Its thirst is not slaked at sewers of dulness spiced with immorality. These symptoms savor of one disease known to all pathologists as notoriety. In an age of this dreaded disease it is surely refreshing to meet with works that breathe gentleness and repose,—a beautiful trust in religion, and a warm, natural heart for humanity. These traits will the reader find in abundance in the pages of Katherine Conway. “What kills a poet,” says Aldrich, “is self-conceit.” Of all the forms self-conceit may assume none is more foolish or detrimental, especially to a woman-poet, than the pluming of oneself as the harbinger of some renovating gospel, some panacea for human infirmities. What is the burden of your message? says the critic to the young poet. Straightway the poet evolves a message, and as messages of this kind ought to be mysterious, the poet wraps them in a jargon as unintelligible as Garner’s monkey dialect. Thus in America has risen a school of woman poetry, deluded by false criticism, calling itself a message to humanity, dubbed rightly the school of passion, and one might add, of pain. This school may ask, “Am I to be debarred from treating of the passions on the score of sex.” By no means; the passions are legitimate subjects. Love, one of them, is your most attractive theme, but as Lilly has it, love is not to you what it is to the physiologist, a mere animal impulse which man has in common with moths and molluscs.