Now on the summit of Love’s topmost peak Kiss we and part; no further can we go; And better death than we from high to low Should dwindle, and decline from strong to weak. We have found all, there is no more to seek; All we have proved, no more is there to know; And Time can only tutor us to eke Out rapture’s warmth with custom’s afterglow. We cannot keep at such a height as this; For even straining souls like ours inhale But once in life so rarefied a bliss. What if we lingered till love’s breath should fail! Heaven of my earth! one more celestial kiss, Then down by separate pathways to the vale. Will the merry Pikes of the Lower Mississippi littoral and the gamboling whale-backers of the Duluth hinterland be pleased to say what is laughable in all this? It is not to be denied that Mr. Austin has written a good deal of “mighty poor stuff,” but I humbly submit that a writer is not to be judged by his poorest work, but by his best,—as an athlete is rated, not by the least weight that he has lifted, but by the greatest—not by his nearest cast of the discus, but by his farthest. Surely a poet, as well as a race-horse, is entitled to the benefit of his “record performance.” 1903. HALL CAINE ON HALL CAINING Mr. Hall Caine once took the trouble to explain that he put in three years of hard work on his novel, _The Christian_, rewriting it many times and submitting the several and various parts of the work to experts. One kind of expert he failed to consult—a person having some knowledge of the English language. Amongst other insupportable characteristics the very first sentence in the book contains twelve prepositions and several clashing relatives and concludes with a sequence of four dactyls! The first sentence is as far as I have gone into the book, of which I know only that the manuscript was sold for a considerable fortune and that by many thousands of my fellow-creatures it is regarded as a distinctly immortaler work than the immortalest work of the week immediately preceding the date of its publication. Of Mr. Caine himself I know a little more: for example, that if he were cast away on an island never before seen by a white man, in a few months every native would have a brand-new novel and Mr. Caine all the cowry-shells in the island.