on the lookout for the verses of a young poet who lived in this part of the world. I remember that one of his poems related how that once when Diana was at her bath in some clear spring, no doubt known to the poet, a sort of sublimated Hoosier of the fancy, himself quite nude and classic, passed near by. He quickly, however, ran away far through the green thick groves of May,-- “‘Afeard lest down the wind of Spring He’d hear an arrow whispering.’” There is a great deal of the Indiana landscape to be found through Mr. Thompson’s poems, though he often looks southward to the north Georgia hills and to Florida. Servile descriptions he does not give, but against backgrounds traced with great delicacy and beauty he throws suddenly and for a moment only some fleeting spirit of the woodland. There is in his language “the continual slight novelty” which is indispensable in poetry that is to haunt and taunt the memory. As an instance of his felicity a poem called “Before Dawn” may be cited:-- “A keen, insistent hint of dawn Fell from the mountain height; A wan, uncertain gleam betrayed The faltering of the night. “The emphasis of silence made The fog above the brook Intensely pale; the trees took on A haunted, haggard look. “Such quiet came, expectancy Filled all the earth and sky: Time seemed to pause a little space; I heard a dream go by!” Such subjects he always handles finely, leaving the thought in a spell of mild wonder and awe, as if something beautiful had passed and vanished. Similar effects were often possible with him in his younger days; and it is a question whether the moods from which such work proceeds recur after youth, the dream, has departed and taken that from the heart which “never comes again.” Those early pieces could not have been written by an indoors man; there is a refreshing quality of the open air in every line of them. The note is unusual, and is perhaps best sounded rarely; lightness and deftness are necessary to him who would evoke its entire purity and melody. In “The Death of the White Heron,” “A Flight Shot,” “Diana,” “The Fawn,” and “In the Haunts of Bass and Bream,” he trusted his fortunes to rhymed couplets of eight syllables, which are particularly well adapted to his purposes. The last-named poem relates with tantalizing deliberation the taking of a bass; the life of the stream pending the capture is described in musical, transitional passages to the refrain,-- “Bubble, bubble, flows the stream, Like low music through a dream.”