Hospitable Mr. Braithwaite _Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1915, by William Stanley Braithwaite. New York: Gomme and Marshall._ Mr. Braithwaite has chosen the guests for his house party with kindly catholicity. Amy Lowell, John Gould Fletcher, and H. D. sit uncomfortably in his New England parlor eyeing one another furtively. Clement Wood clowns in a corner. Vachel Lindsay before the mantel-piece declaims to James Oppenheim and Louis Untermeyer, who listen with an air of importance. Edgar Lee Masters sits on the _corpus juris_ and meditates upon the beauties of silence. Sara Teasedale dances in the hallway. Harriet Monroe reclines on a porch chair, listening to the rain. A crowd in the library recreate themselves by reading from a set of British Poets. Percy MacKaye gloomily reads the war news to a group in the dining-room, while little Arvia, his daughter, lisps happily to herself. And alone in the kitchen is Robert Frost roasting chestnuts. Who will say that Mr. Braithwaite could have better performed the duties of host? Did he omit any of the “older established names”? And did he not make a special Cook’s tour to far off islands (not shown in the atlas of the _Boston Transcript_ office) for the purpose of bringing home with him certain “new discoveries”? Mr. Braithwaite pats his guests admiringly upon the back and regrets that there are other excellent poets for whom he has no accommodations. Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Maxwell Bodenheim, perhaps he will invite you next time. Is it not a pleasant anticipation? Empty Souls _The Later Life, by Louis Couperus. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company._ This is the second part of the tetralogy of “Small Souls” which began to appear in English last year. The slowly-developing epic is pregnant with promises, but, oh how slowly the skein unrolls. We are still in the midst of Dutch bourgeoisie, dull, stony-faced, petty, filthy; again the incessant rain, ever-cloudy skies, bicycle rides, large dinner-parties at Mama’s. Small souls. Last year I asked the question whether in depicting Dutch life Couperus could not find a single big soul, one interesting individual. This second book gives us pale glimmers of potentialities, very pale indeed. The big man is big only relatively; he has been in America, worked in factories, and is now ... lecturing on peace.