Miss Lowell states that she has “made no attempt at an exhaustive critical analysis of the various works” of her poets. “Rather, I have tried to suggest certain things which appear to the trained poet while reading them. The pages and pages of hair-splitting criticism turned out by erudite gentlemen for their own amusement has been no part of my scheme. But I think the student, the poet seeking new inspiration, the reader endeavoring to understand another poetic idiom, will find what they need to set them on their way.” That is so: this book contains six causeries in which Miss Lowell tells you why she loves these poets, and what she loves about them, interrupting her talk every now and then to read some poem to you which illustrates her meaning, introducing every now and then a fragment of biography to correspond with the stage of the poet’s work to which she has brought you, or stopping every now and then to pick out rare phrases and rare music of words for your especial delight. No one, I suppose, will have listened to Miss Lowell’s causerie in so happy a setting as the sitting-room on the third floor of a hotel in Piccadilly in which she talked to us in the August of 1914. Through the long French window open in the corner could be seen the length of Piccadilly, its great electric globes, its shining roadway, and, on the left, the tops of the trees of Green Park, dark grey in the moonlight; the noise of the motorbusses and of the taxis reached us in a muted murmur, and at the corner of the park opposite, beneath a street lamp, stood a newsboy, whose headlines we strained our eyes from time to time to catch. It was in this tenseness created by the expectation of news that Miss Lowell read Paul Fort and Henri de Régnier to us (she reads French beautifully); and it is the emotion of those evenings, more than anything else, that her book brings back to me. This is not criticism, I know; but I am a critic displumed. I have quoted Miss Lowell’s statement of her aims; let me now give my impression of what she has done. You can take up her book, and read it from beginning to end without weariness or boredom; you will be continually interested, continually delighted, continually moved. Miss Lowell’s method of quoting whole poems and long poems as well as detached and beautiful fragments has filled her book with an emotional content that almost makes me afraid to open it; the fear of too much beauty. And, finally, she has flattered the sense of personal superiority in us all by allowing little slips to remain where we may find them, and preen ourselves on our cleverness. When you have absorbed all these sensations, you will have come to Appendix A, which is 140 pages of the finest translations into English that exist of the six poets in question, or, it might truly be said, of the French poets of the symbolist generation. In these translations, Miss Lowell has rarely been tempted away from prose, and you have only to compare her