'Till Angels and weak men twelve years should govern o'er the strong;

And then their end should come when France receiv'd the Demon's

light.

Stiff shudderings shook the heav'nly thrones! France, Spain and Italy,
In terror view'd the bands of Albion, and the ancient Guardians
Fainting upon the elements smitten with their own plagues
They slow advance to shut the five gates of their law built heaven
Filled with blasting fancies and with mildews of despair

With fierce disease and lust unable to stem the fires of Orc;

But the five Gates were consum'd, and their bolts and hinges melted
And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens and round the abodes of

men.

DRAMAS OF NEW ENGLAND: GILES COREY;' 'SHORE-ACRES.'

FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE OF

AND

DEAR ✶ ✶ ✶ I have been to see two dramas of New England life lately. New England of the past inspires Giles Corey,' and the New England of this morning, so to speak, animates' ShoreAcres.' Steeple-crowned hats lord it in one play, and overalls dominate the other; but the same stern spirit of the steeple-crowns, which smothers the open expression of native passions, good or bad, in the earlier play, lives on in the later play in the hardness of selfish conservatism, much out of sorts with modern sentiment and with the large free curves and bracing air of Atlantic shore

acres.

While I sat circumspectly in my chair, with my nineteenth century aluminium-mounted lenses at my eyes to aid me in my cool binocular reflections, my unassisted senses dwelt covertly on a solemn fact, my own eight or nine generations of Yankee lineage binding me down into consciousness of my latent kinship with the intolerant old duffers who make the tragedy of both plays.

Hawthorne's words spoke for me: "Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him not less fervently for being one step further from

them in the march of ages." Bless me! You see, the steeplecrown will never die; it looks a modern opera-glass out of countenance and preaches in a play-house!

The opening of 'Giles Corey' I found sombre, poetic rather than dramatic. Pretty Olive Corey presided at the spinning wheel; the silly old crone, Nancy Fox, hugged the fire-place, chuckling over the witch-pin game she is carrying on surreptitiously with the child Phoebe, when the jealous young woman enters whose spite and hysteria are to instigate the tragedy of the piece. Later appear Giles Corey, to fan the spark of danger with his superstitious, blundering talk; the goodwife Corey, notable housekeeper, pooh-poohing at witch stories; and Olive's lover Paul Bayley. All these important personal elements of the tragic sequel are cleverly introduced in the first act; but, to my mind, they are not made impressive as dramatic factors of the result.

The work was well-designed, low-toned, strictly in keeping with the suppressed passions of New England Puritanism, but it had the effect of narrative.

You would have liked a pretty love-scene there was between Paul and Olive; his face glowing with half-concealed delight over the news he had to tell of the lot he had bought that morning for their future home-building, while he waited for her to finish her stint at the distant spinning-wheel, urging her to come and sit beside him on the settle, and yet approving with all his decorous Puritan heart her seemly reserve and conscientiousness.

The most powerful scene, and decidedly the most applauded, was the trial-scene speech of Martha Corey for her daughter. She stood like a lioness, and her plea had the fire of menace in it. It was Agnes Booth's great acting chance of the piece, and she made the most of it. Mr. Mackey, who played Giles Corey's part with stanch yeomanlike heroism, had his opportunity in the prison scene, where he rudely reasons out his resolve to stand mute and bear the pressing of the weights unto death. The love of the elders seemed to dwarf that of their children with Giles's words: "I will make amends to thee, lass; I swear I will come where thou art by a harder road than the one I bade thee go."

Giles Corey;'

I turned to Longfellow's 'Giles Corey' afterwards for comparison. You remember it? Who can fail to be struck with the superior skill of Miss Wilkins's more human, more rational way of rendering the historic story?

Curious how modern this play of hers is in its realism, and yet how lacking it is in what one is wont to consider the equally modern note of psychological depth! I amused myself by imagining another mode of treating the same plot. Fancy a new construction of the piece, revealing the very root of action in a strong, rebellious, double-minded nature, such as a prime mover in the bewitchment tumult of the day must have had! Would not such a figure concentrate interest and dramatic force? Would not the clash of her ill-will against the victims of the public delusion make the whole piece pulse with fiercer blood?

If you have not seen the pretty little black and white volume in which Harper & Brothers have brought out' Giles Corey,' you must get it. I was twice as interested in reading the play again after having seen it acted.

I was glad to notice, by the way, that the unjustly abused Theatre of Arts and Letters had done themselves credit in one of their "cuts." I mean the excision of the needless scene where the child drags the rheumatic old crone to hide with her under the bed, a farcical proceeding dangerous to act. The unkindest cut, I think, is the belittling of Ann's part. Of course, as I venture to propose that her part might have been made the vital cause of the tragedy, I regret the more that the prominence the author herself really did give it was flattened out, from many an artful speech in the trial scene, into mere groans and writhings.

Have you noticed how closely Miss Wilkins's subdued style of writing, bare of imagery, devoid of involution and verbal felicities, fits her theme? It seems to me to be born of the same conditions as those that bred the scenes of which she writes with such narrowness of aim. Its felicity is its simplicity; but, I suspect, it would be poverty in a richer, warmer range of subject-matter. But her choice of subject is a legitimate part of her art, you will say; and, certainly, if her New England created her, she has been enabled

thus the fitlier to recreate and set before the world her own New England. One may or may not like Hawthorne's way of doing it better, yet I have a secret notion that Miss Wilkins's is the truer, the less transmuted into a mystical romance due rather to the indidual vision than to actual life.

Strange to say, 'Shore-Acres,' rough-hewn and homespun as it is, struck me as idyllic. It is full of pathetic effects, rich in the homely comic and in sentiment; but it is picturesque rather than robustly dramatic. The children's parts are charmingly real; the universal heart is captured from the first by the "cute" prattle of these country children. Surely never did play-wright make so much capital out of this natural well-spring of pleasure; it was a successful graft on the melodrama of the plot, which consisted in the father's orthodox bitterness against his daughter's lover. This young physician has the impertinence, forsooth, to believe in evolution; while he, Farmer Berry, believes as his father did, and is ready as his way of progressing to sell out every particle of "sentiment" along with the old farm. His gentle-hearted brother Nathaniel has a prominent part to play as the champion of warm heart and free brain against his brother's narrow mind and selfish soul; and the irresistible acting - where all the acting was clever - of Mr. James A. Herne made it a doubly important part. The large, quizzical, loving humor he put into it was like nothing but Joe Jefferson's Rip, and fully the mate of it along a different and original line of character interpretation.

Have you heard of the stage-trick of the light-house scene? It was the dramatic climax of the piece. While the schooner carrying the eloping lovers is driven in by the "Sou'easter," inside the lighthouse, a grim tussle is going on between the two brothers, — the father is trying to keep Nathaniel from replenishing the light. It grows dimmer and dimmer in the theatre in the conventional way the audience is used to, when, at the same instant, as Nathaniel breaks from the churl and makes for the light-house stairs, the audience gets a genuine surprise, out goes all light, and the house is black for full three minutes before the light streams out again from the tower and the "Liddy Ann" is saved. I can fancy you

commenting wisely: "A scenic effect impossible before the day of electric lighting, and directly due, therefore, to scientific mechanism." And so it is, and why not? Only one half hopes that the intricacy of stage effects, made possible by these new material resources, may out-do itself, at last, and lead to the unalloyed impress of dramatic genius. The ethical climax reached in the last scene by quite human means is an example. The sweet-natured Nathaniel, having yielded to his brother even his chance to win the woman both love, having reconciled the family and brought about the happiness of all who knew him, is represented in this final scene in the nightly acts of care-taker for the household, -— setting to rights, bolting doors, attending to the kitchen fire; then turning bedward, candle in hand, alone and silent in the happy house, he contemplates with a face wholesome to look upon the fruit of a beneficent life-time. This good genius of the house of Berry sees his work that it is good, and the audience watch his slow clumping boots and rustic figure up the kitchen-stairs to his bedroom with a democratic and moral emotion quite new to the theatre.

Yours,

SOME RECENT AMERICAN VERSE.*

SOME one has recently calculated that there are at the present time about one hundred thousand poets in America. Fortunately

* A Book of Day Dreams, Charles Leonard Moore. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1892.. Songs and Sonnets, by Maurice Francis Egan. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1892.- Eleusis and Lesser Poems, by William Rufus Perkins. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1892. Red Leaves and Roses, by Madison Cawein. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1893. Francis Drake; A Tragedy of the Sea, The Mother and Other Poems, by S. Weir Mitchell. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1893.-El Nuovo Mundo, by Louis James Block. Chicago: Chas. H. Kerr and Co., 1893. Some Rhymes of Ironquil of Kansas. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1892. - Ideälä, A Romance of Idealism, by Charles Grissen. Portland, Oregon: J. K. Gill Co., 1893.-Thought Throbs, by Creedmore Fleenor. Louisville: John P. Morton and Co., 1892. By the Atlantic, by I. D. Van Duzee.