Some time ago, in response to a need brought to its attention by one of the local officers in Texas, the American Institute of Civics offered to superintend the distribution among the prisons of the United States of literature suitable for the use of prisoners. Citizens were asked to coöperate, and much good literature has thus been placed in the hands of those who have found it not only a source of entertainment, but, through its refining and elevating influences, a means of great benefit. This beneficent work can be indefinitely extended with a little cost if citizens who appreciate its importance will give to it their aid by contributions of literature, such as wholesome works of fiction, popular works of history, treatises on the useful arts and industries, popular periodicals, etc., etc.; or by assisting in the payment of the cost of collection and distribution. One of the Institute's councillors in the State of Washington, President Penrose of Whitman College, has recently made an appeal for such literature for the use of convicts in the Washington penitentiary. Inquiries as to methods of coöperation, or gifts for the prison literature expense fund, may be sent to the American Institute of Civics, 203 Broadway, New York. "THE TEMPEST" THE SEQUEL TO "HAMLET." BY EMILY DICKEY BEERY. "The Tempest" is a little enchanted world where play all the forces that are manifested in the larger creation from the lowest animalism to the highest manhood, harmonious with his invisible environment. This world in miniature--true to the laws of the macrocosm--begins in chaos, storm, and stress, but finds completion in supernal air and divine peace. We shall find by consecutive study of the dramas that the poet, in his creative work, has ever risen from lower manifestations to higher as his own soul soared on higher and higher wing. Prospero was his last, greatest, and divinest thought of man in his unfolding godward. Nature in her evolution takes no vast strides, and her supreme poet follows her divine current of growth from the animal man to the grand manifestation of his ideal. He understood that in man's unfolding not a round could be missed of the "Jacob's Ladder" resting upon the earth, but reaching into the heavens. In this ideal world of "The Tempest," Caliban stands upon the earth groping to attain the first step, while Prospero stands upon the summit with his face heavenward. This typical man comes upon the stage on a high plane of development. Long previously he had left the rank and file of humanity to tread the ever lonely path to higher achievement, therefore we must look below him to find, among the creations of the poet, the incarnation which was the chrysalis for this last ideal. Here our intuitive perception immediately descries Hamlet, that wonderful human mystery who was the first of Shakspere's sons to enter the precincts of the inner life and catch a glimpse of the godlike potentialities of the human soul.