the hardihood to say, “The poem has no merit,” transcends the limits of human comprehension and passes into the dark domain of literary criticism. Nine in ten of the poem’s critics complain of the fantastic, grotesque, or ghastly nature of its fancies. What would these good persons have on the subject of wizardry?—sweet and sunny pictures of rural life?—love scenes in urban drawing-rooms?—beautiful sentiments appropriate to young ladies’ albums?—high moral philosophy with an “appeal” to what is “likest God within the soul”? Deacon Harvey (O, I cannot get away from Deacon Harvey: he fascinates me!) would have “an interpretation of vital truth.” I do not know what that is, but we have his word for it that nothing else is poetry. And no less a personage than Mrs. Gertrude Atherton demands, instead of wizardry, an epic of prehistoric California, or an account of the great fire, preferably in prose, for, “this is not an age of poetry, anyway.” Alas, poor Sterling!—damned alike for what he wrote and what he didn’t write. Truly, there are persons whom one may not hope to please. It should in fairness be said that Mrs. Atherton confesses herself no critic of poetry—the only person, apparently, who is not—but pronounces Mr. Sterling a “recluse” who “needs to see more and read less.” From a pretty long acquaintance with him I should say that this middle-aged man o’ the world is as little “reclusive” as any one that I know, and has seen rather more of life than is good for him. And I doubt if he would greatly gain in mental stature by unreading Mrs. Atherton’s excellent novels. Sterling’s critics are not the only persons who seem a bit blinded by the light of his genius: Mr. Joaquin Miller, a born poet and as great-hearted a man as ever lived, is not quite able to “place” him. He says that this “titanic, magnificent” poem is “classic” “in the Homeric, the Miltonic sense.” “A Wine of Wizardry” is not “classic” in the sense in which scholars use that word. It is all color and fire and movement, with nothing of the cold simplicity and repose of the Grecian ideal. Nor is it Homeric, nor in the Miltonic vein. It is in no vein but the author’s own; in the entire work is only one line suggesting the manner of another poet—the last in this passage: Who leads from hell his whitest queens, arrayed In chains so heated at their master’s fire That one new-damned had thought their bright attire Indeed were coral, till the dazzling dance So terribly that brilliance shall enhance. That line, the least admirable in the poem, is purely Byronic. Possibly Mr. Miller meant that Sterling’s work is like Homer’s and Milton’s, not in manner, but in excellence; and it is.