What Rahel's power over her contemporaries was we may gather from what they say of her who was "Rahel and nothing more:" Heine describes her as "the most inspired woman in the universe." T. Mundt calls her "the sympathetic nerve of the time." The Austrian dramatist, Grillparzer, relates: "Varnhagen went home with me. As we passed his house, it occurred to him to introduce me to his wife, the afterwards so celebrated Rahel, of whom I then knew nothing. I had been strolling about all day and felt tired to death, and was, therefore, heartily glad when we were told that Frau Varnhagen was not at home. But as we came down the stairs, she met us and I submitted to my fate. But now the lady,--elderly, perhaps never handsomer, shriveled by illness, reminding me rather of a fairy, not to say a witch,--began to talk, and I was altogether enchanted. My weariness disappeared, or perhaps, rather, gave way to intoxication. She talked and talked till nearly midnight, and I don't know whether they turned me out or whether I went away of my own accord. Never in my life have I heard anyone talk more interestingly. Unfortunately it was near the end of my stay, and I could not repeat the visit." The Poetry of Rupert Brooke MARGARET C. ANDERSON _Poems_, by Rupert Brooke. (Sidgwick and Jackson, London.) The unusual thing about Rupert Brooke--the young Oxford don whose poetry is just finding its way in this country--is that he has graduated from the French school without having taken a course in decadence. The result is a type of English poetry minus those qualities we think of as typical of "the British mind" and plus those that stand as the highest expression of the French spirit. There is nothing of self-conscious reserve about Mr. Brooke; and yet it is not so obvious a quality as his frank, unashamed revealment that places him definitely with the French type. It is rather a matter of form--that quality of saying a thing in the most economic way it can be said, of finding the simple and the inevitable word. Mr. Brooke stands very happily between a poet like Alfred Noyes, in whom one rarely finds that careful selection, and the esthetes whose agony in that direction becomes monotonous. For example, in the first sonnet of this collection: Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire Of watching you; and swing me suddenly Into the shade and loneliness and mire Of the last land! There, waiting patiently, One day, I think, I'll feel a cool wind blowing, See a slow light across the Stygian tide, And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing, And tremble. And I shall know that you have died, And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream, Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host, Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam-- Most individual and bewildering ghost!--