Professor Henry A. Beers was born at Buffalo on the second of July, 1847. He was admitted to the New York Bar in 1870, but in 1871 became an Instructor in English Literature at Yale, teaching continuously for forty-five years, when he retired. He has written--at too rare intervals--all his life. His book of short stories, containing _A Suburban Pastoral_ and _Split Zephyr_, the last-named being, according to Meredith Nicholson, the best story of college life ever printed, would possibly have attracted more general attention were it not for its prevailing tone of quiet, unobtrusive pessimism, an unwelcome note in America. I am as sure of the high quality of _A Suburban Pastoral_ as I am sure of anything; and have never found a critic who, after reading the tale, disagreed with me. In 1885 Professor Beers published a little volume of poems, _The Thankless Muse_; and in 1917 he collected in a thin book _The Two Twilights_, the best of his youthful and mature poetic production. The variety of expression is so great that no two poems are in the same mood. In _Love, Death, and Life_ we have one of the most passionate love-poems in American literature; in _The Pasture Bars_ the valediction has the soft, pure tone of a silver bell. Professor Beers has both vigour and grace. His fastidious taste permits him to write little, and to print only a small part of what he writes. But the force of his poetic language is so extraordinary that it has sometimes led to a complete and unfortunate misinterpretation of his work. In _The Dying Pantheist to the Priest_, he wrote a poem as purely dramatic, as non-personal, as the monologues of Browning; he quite successfully represented the attitude of an (imaginary) defiant, unrepentant pagan to an (imaginary) priest who wished to save him in his last moments. The speeches put into the mouth of the pantheist no more represent Mr. Beers's own sentiments than Browning's poem _Confessions_ represented Browning's attitude toward death and religion; yet it is perhaps a tribute to the fervour of the lyric that many readers have taken it as a violent attack on Christian theology. Just as I am certain of the finished art of _A Suburban Pastoral,_ I am equally certain of the beauty and nobility of the poetry in _The Two Twilights._ This volume gives its author an earned place in the front rank of living American poets. To me one of the most original and charming of the songs is the valediction to New York--and the homage to New Haven. NUNC DIMITTIS Highlands of Navesink, By the blue ocean's brink, Let your grey bases drink Deep of the sea. Tide that comes flooding up, Fill me a stirrup cup, Pledge me a parting sup, Now I go free. Wall of the Palisades, I know where greener glades, Deeper glens, darker shades, Hemlock and pine, Far toward the morning lie Under a bluer sky, Lifted by cliffs as high, Haunts that are mine.