Sometimes when I read D’Annunzio I feel that he has moulded sentences, phrases, upon the proud painted canvasses of the past of his native land. His prose approaches the sumptuous completeness of Veronese. His old gardens of Rome have the poignancy of personal regret. Listen to this: “Even the garden was dull and sleep held. It was imbued with silence as rich as honey, as thick and heavy as wax, as precious gums. There was abandon and sadness, which exhausted themselves in belated perfume ... from here one could glimpse a pallid swamp with too tall lilies; yellow, heavy with pollen.” Once when D’Annunzio was ill with fever he dreamed nightly of the rich gardens of Rome, with their fountains. Of the kind of writing D’Annunzio does, there is not another example in the world today. I fancy there will not be another, until the age of mechanism, scientific mind, reaches its height, and passes. All things perish after they flower, even the ages. Henry Bordeaux once exclaimed: “Here I am in Rome again after seventeen years!” Then he recalls his youth: _O those morning walks in the perfumed gardens on the Pincian!_ (Rodriguez, the South American novelist, says in _Idolos Rotos_: “I can not forget the tardy twilights on the Pincian!”) Bordeaux remarks as an aside, that even humble people, in Rome, have the gift of eloquence. _Italy!_ Enchanting land, which still holds the heart of the world, and all its youth! A soundly made novel that deserves consideration from thinkers, is _Idolos Rotos_ (Broken Idols), by Manuel Diaz Rodriguez, published long ago in Venezuela. It is powerful in sense of sociological, economical, and political forces. It is a possessive reproduction of locality. I do not know of any other one book in which an idle reader can learn to understand so well, the differing values, the changing present condition of a great race, suddenly thrust into new material backgrounds, undergoing the too rapid physiological pressure of an untried climate. The book has mental detachment. It has balance of ideas. It has calm, unprejudiced observation. It is brilliant, subtle, and penetrating. And it has fine sincerity. The writer carries forward fearlessly the logic of a visioned idea. The prose is always good and sometimes great. Few have been able to look upon the civilizations that grew up with mushroom swiftness in the new lands of the West, the Americas, with clearer eyes. We meet here the mind of South American youth. And the book has stable novel architecture. “_Victimas de un sistema_.... Victims of an educational system which is wholly speed and with which they pretend to ripen brains and polish intelligence, just as heavy machinery is moved about by electricity or steam ... harmonious development is impossible,” writes Rodriguez. It is a story of a wealthy young South American, educated for years in Europe, who comes home and tries to take up again the life he knew in childhood.