As a man eats and drinks, so is his body: if he is a gross feeder, his body will be gross and sensual; if his food lacks nourishment, he will pine and fade. So it is with our minds and our morals. With whatever original "spiritual body" we may start, it needs spiritual sustenance, spiritual discipline, spiritual sufficiency and spiritual abstinence. Too often we ill-use it, as bodies are ill-used, goading its weakness with fiery excitement, or gorging its greed with sickly sentiment, or emasculating it by empty frivolity. All who desire spiritual health must find out what books best promote it in themselves: and sometimes they are found, like wholesome herbs, in very lowly places. One good rule is never to recommend what we have not seen proved in ourselves, or on others. ISABELLA FYVIE MAYO. THE SWAN-SONG OF SEPTEMBER. This fine sonnet is from _Lyric Leaves_, poems by S. Gertrude Ford. 2s. 6d. net (postage 2d.). (C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 3 Tudor Street, London, E.C.) Sing out thy swan-song with full throat, September, From a full heart, with golden notes and clear! No rose will wreathe thee; yet the harebell's here, And still thy crown of heath the hills remember. Bright burns thy fire, e'en to its latest ember, The sunset fire that lights thee to thy bier, Flaming and failing not, albeit so near Dun-robed October waits, and grey November. And though, at sight of thee, a chill change passes Through wood and wold, on leaves and flowers and grasses, Thy beauty wanes not; thou hast ne'er grown old; Death-crowned as Cleopatra, lovely lying Even to the end; magnificently dying In pomp of purple and in glare of gold. S. GERTRUDE FORD. THE QUEST FOR BEAUTY. If you have travelled at all frequently on certain of the London "tube" railways you may occasionally have noticed, facing you in the carriage, a small framed poster which for beauty and imaginative power has, I should think, never been surpassed in advertising art. If the first sight of it did not make you catch your breath you will not, I am afraid, be interested in this article. The poster represents a rich landscape, in which noble tree-forms show sombre against a tumultuous sky--the latter an architectural mass of pale cloud, spanned by a vivid rainbow. Across the lower part of the picture is a scroll, on which are written, in musical notation, two bars from Chopin's Twentieth Prelude. At the top are the words, _Studies in Harmony_: it is an advertisement of Somebody & Co.'s wall-papers.