Maeterlinck, in his book about bees, borrowed from Fabre. In philosophical articles he has shown indebtedness to India. I recall a series of these articles in which he uses the words, _the unknown guest_, literally translated from Sanskrit. He has been praised for the phrase. It is a fine phrase. But it does not belong to Maeterlinck. Alfred Noyes, in _Drake_, leaned lightly upon a narrative poem by Spencer, describing South America. An Arabic poet, on his way to exile in Africa, sang sadly: _It’s a long white road to Mekinez!_ That was before the days of _Tipperary_. There are writers, (ideas) whose attraction, influence, has been for people of distant races, who have leaped across national boundaries. Song, like the wind, keeps a way of its own. English Byron’s influence was greatest in Russia. There it moulded a race of poets. It set seal upon a movement in letters. Both Puschkin and Lermontov, the two most gifted poets of the country, have been nicknamed _The Russian Byron_. In Germany, on the contrary, Byron’s influence was slight, just as the influence of the French Revolution was slight there, and spread out helplessly, like sea water across marsh-land. The romantic movement, whatever and whenever may have been its origin, reached height, became rotten, over-ripe, in Poland, in Hungary, in prose and verse. No poets have so gone the limit in creation of romantic verse as Slowacki, Mickiewicz, and Krasinski, in Poland. And no romantic prose, (I mean in realm of the story), can equal that of Paul Gyulai, the Hungarian, as reliable as he was in criticism, and less romantic, although still tainted with it, the novels of Csiky, likewise of Hungary. The character of Merlin, and the Forest of Broceliande, has had fascination for French mind. French poets refer to it often. They try to re-create its appeal in their tongue. Apollinaire wrote a book about it, a book magnificently illustrated with wood-cuts by Derain. He called it _L’Enchanteur Pourrissant_. The subject allured that delightful poet, Paul Fort. His book, part of which sings the song of the misty north over again, is called _Les Enchanteurs_. Jaroslav Vrchlicky wrote sonnets to Merlin, who teased his Bohemian fancy. English poets have not cared so greatly, aside from Tennyson. The idea has a sumptuousness a trifle un-English, a twist of mind not usual with the race. Although the Russians, in the old days, read French prodigiously and spoke it, their mind was influenced by England, by Germany. The philosophy of the latter ploughed furrows through the race which time has not been able to efface. The effect of France over the mind of Russia was greatest in the Eighteenth Century. The educated Russian was always comparatively free to choose mental food, because it was easy for him to read other tongues. Right here is mark of kinship with the Orient, whose subtle thinking fell so easily into different moulds.