sleepers but Ursula awake. “She is not asleep,” says the queen. “Pour water on her.... Open the door.... It is too late.... Shut! shut!” All cry, shaking the door, and knocking at the window: “Open, open!” A black curtain falls. “Nobody,” says Mr. Thomas, “who has read ‘Les Aveugles’ and ‘L’Intruse’ could doubt the authorship of ‘Les Sept Princesses.’ Here are the same agitated, helpless people speaking in abrupt, simple, and oft-repeated phrases. Here again, something is going on which they do not understand, and are impotent to arrest or change. But the matter of both earlier plays was a not improbable incident which was developed, it may be extravagantly, but in a manner that touched human beings. If ‘Les Aveugles’ was extraordinary, while ‘L’Intruse’ was not extraordinary in any way, both were easy to understand. But ‘Les Sept Princesses’ is a picture drawn for its own sake. It has its logic, but the elements in it seem chosen, like those of ‘La Princesse Maleine,’ because they are attractive in themselves—the marble hall and stairs, the terrace, the dark land of marshes and forests, the canal and the warship, the seven princesses in white sleeping on the stairs, the swans, the prince arriving to claim one of them and finding her at last dead, the old king and queen shut outside the hall and knocking vainly at the windows; only, these elements are combined without any of the unwieldiness of ‘La Princesse Maleine,’ without interfering with themselves or with anything else. It is simply a picture in Maeterlinck’s manner, and this manner has the effect of creating a feeling of helplessness and smallness in the presence of fate and the earth.” It was not until a later period that Maeterlinck came under the influence of the American Emerson. “A Belgian Emerson,” Mr. James Huneker has said, “but an Emerson who had in him much of Edgar Allan Poe.” Surely it was not through Emerson that Maeterlinck found the author of “The Raven.” Nor is it certain that there was any direct inspiration at all. More likely it is that the same visions burned early in the brain of the Flemish mystic that had seethed in the mind of the gifted, erratic American half a century before. There was no need for him to know “The House of Usher” of the Poe tale. Was there not a House of Usher perched on every Flemish hill, at the bottom of every Flemish valley? Was not the man a forerunner of Maeterlinck who wrote this?