In this first American edition of his _Set of Six_, Conrad is revealed as an artist _par excellence_. You find no subjective emotionalism on the part of the author in any of his six tales, in spite of their subtitles—_Romantic_, _Indignant_, _Pathetic_, and the like. You see in him the wistful observer of characters and situations, which he presents with impassionate objectivity, with the impartiality of a painter who lovingly draws his object, whether it is ugly or beautiful, whether it is a villain or a saint. Conrad possesses a wonderful skill in setting up a background, which, at times, appears of more importance than the plot. He makes you feel equally at home in the atmosphere of Napoleonic France and of France of the Restoration, of revolutionary Peru and of a Neapolitan amusement garden. You enjoy the tales greatly, you admire the clever craftsmanship of the story-teller, but you close the book with an empty feeling, as if you had listened to brilliant anecdotes in a bachelors’ club. K. Amy Lowell’s Poetry _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, by Amy Lowell._ [_The Macmillan Company, New York._] In one of his letters, Byron says: “To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.” Such a confession seems strange coming from a poet, and it is a confession of quite a different character which is written on every page of Miss Lowell’s book of poems. There one finds in every line the expression of a personality which tries to realize itself and succeeds in doing so. The unity as well as the interest of the book is in this very development of a strong personality, of which a new and original aspect is revealed in every poem. What charms us at once in this personality, and renders the reading of the book a constant enchantment, is a most wonderful imagination—an imagination at the same time creative and representative, rich, varied, overflowing with images and themes. All that life and nature offer is the domain of this imagination; it wakes up at the most unexpected moment and seizes the unseen detail, giving us an idea of the wonderful wanderings through which it must take the person fortunate enough to possess it. Now it is a temple; now a church; now a beggar; a blue scarf; the distant notes of a flute; or the nocturnal noises of a London street, which starts it on its way. At other times we find the imagination at play with itself, so to speak, creating out of nothing a historical or legendary atmosphere, or opening a philosophical vista, as in _The Great Adventure of Max Breuck_, _The Basket_, or the poem from which the book takes its name. Each one of these poems (and several others also) has its own special atmosphere, precise in its complexity and different from all the others.