It is for this reason that the poets and fantastists are closer to our moods through the changing years than all other writers. When the historians, philosophers and social prophets and the rest find us indifferent and content to let the world slide, when great names and ideals no longer stir or move us, when experience has disenchanted us with life and humanity, and so stript history and philosophy and religion of all significance, when all our enthusiasms are gone, love is an exchange of domestic services for the sake of economy, and friendship is a long laid ghost of youth--then we can recur again and again to the authors who turn our chimney corner into that wider dominion of freedom the human spirit can never quite relinquish in its dreams. Fine spun logic and all the metaphysics of the ages cannot bring us back to faith and hope and charity then; but these few blessed spirits who found their way to Arcady occasionally, give us a spell of oblivion, if not much philosophy, and often a pinch of fortitude for our return to the doom of disenchantment. The republic of beauty is not an important territory or marked very clearly on the current maps of Democracy. But there are still some who cherish the ancient boon of poetry and beauty, and such will appreciate a volume like “The Bibelot,” filled with the literature that blows through our foetid life like God’s wind through a hospital. It is one of the few books that cannot fail to hit the taste of any real book lover. It contains selections from William Blake, James Thomson, Francois Villon, a discourse of Walter Pater’s on Marcus Aurelius, Fragments from Sappho, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, the Pathos of the Rose in Poetry, extracts from Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Lodging for the Night: A Story of Villon,” and other masterpieces of literature. It is a priceless book for the poor student, for these selections have been culled from scarce editions and sources not generally accessible. If our young readers will read the Bibelot, they may acquire the sense of beauty and power of discrimination, and the taste for the best in literature, old and new. They will then become callous to the tawdry domestic twaddle that has been circulated as “literature” in the respectable domestic periodicals, for the past two decades, in this country, and will learn to distinguish genuine literature from mere merchandise. Perhaps then it will be possible for sincere and earnest work to find currency in books in America, as it has not been since the popular picture periodicals took the place of books in our breakneck economy.