I can make affidavit I never wrote a line of poetry before in my life, and so I am sorely troubled at this writing. This is a crisis in my career. I do not know whether to continue in my employment as a writer of soap and medicine “ads,” or to devote myself wholly to the service of the Muses. The question is, am I a genius, or is this new mystic poetry, which is so uplifting and inspiring, merely some delusive imposture of bubbling verbiage? JONATHAN PENN. THE YELLOW GIRL. The advent of the Yellow Girl--the mad, fantastic siren who is beginning to haunt the hoardings and our dreams--is calling forth a good deal of an outcry among those who hold the cure of morals in the English public press. It is rather a difficult undertaking to attempt to import a ray or two of cheer and fantasy into the gloom and drab of English life, but some of the English artists, touched with the spirit of the age, have had the audacity to import the Yellow Girl from Paris. There she is--on every hoarding and bare wall a gleam of light and color and deviltry, under those dull gray skies, that must awaken a flash of fantasy here and there in some toil-worn heart in the crowd, and cheer some fog born pessimists who would fain forget the necessities and narrowness of their drab existence. Instead of the old monotonous clumsy pictures and unescapable rivers of hideous black and white catch words, that seemed to emphasize the limited horizon and freedom of the millions bound to spend their whole lives in the great cities, there are ten thousand variations of the Eternal Feminine in her latest glamor of gold and yellow, and even under the pall of a London sky, the very walls open out into the land of Fantasia. But the moralists are shocked, and they are fearful for the future intellectual and moral stability of England, simply because the Yellow Girl is the embodiment of an artist’s dream of the modern Circe--a reminiscence of the Bacchantic dreams that used to fill the poets’ heads in the old days, before they were all become so very respectable. It is the artist who now puts a little diversion and unreal distraction from the invading ugliness and melancholy of modern metropolitan life into the passing current of our fancies. The poets used to serve this purpose, but they are all so anxious to stand well with Mrs. Grundy nowadays, whereas Mrs. Grundy and the artists have never really arrived at any amicable understanding. Old England and civilization are in no danger from the Yellow Girl. The moralists, unluckily, have no sense of humor, and so they fail to perceive that the masses accept the Yellow Girl as an unreal fantastic abstraction without any sort of relevance to the reality of life, which yet stirs the imagination and puts a little splash of fitful joy into reality.