The Harvard Monthly for April.

The April Monthly is serious, almost depressingly serious. Almost every article, prose, or verse, holds up to view, or for review, a moral theorem, from W. V. Moody's "Pandora" singing the resistlessness of non-resistance (or something like that) to the editors lashing the lax yet elastic conscience of collegiate youth. The conscience of the Monthly is not lax, nor means it "to while away idleness in pursuit of those things which are not of the spirit."

Its literary conscience is especially inflamed against "crass stupidity in journalistic criticism." E. Bernbaum and W. A. Green grow positively heated over the ineptitudes of Boston, and other, critics of Ibsen and Shaw, and crush with grimness the wretched Grub Street on their wheel. Nay, more: they--especially Mr. Green--illustrate what journalistic criticism should be.--easily colloquial, anecdotal, popular, yet sound. Of course, the critics could rejoin that such writing means time and work: does the public want it badly enough to pay for it? Mr. Bernbaum, by the way, is depressed over the American public, is past even regretting the incapacity of Americans to appreciate Ibsen, to him "the greatest dramatist since Shakespere, and probably the greatest author of the nineteenth century." Is there perhaps on the Monthly a certain condescension towards natives?

The fiction is a little lurid, but moral. To call it bookish is little more than to call it contemporary. H. Hagedorn, Jr., draws indeed from the night-life of Harvard: but one soon scents the moral thesis--a 'horrible example' to the text of the admirable sermon of the editorial: and soon recognizes Pengrove and Farrell for what they must have been to the author's own mind--less prodigals than premisses.

The verse, too, thinks hard. Even "The Fawn" forgets to be a child in reason, and prettily woos his "nymph" (who, by the way, as an oak-dweller ought to have been a "dryad") with pantheistic appeal. The rude Scythian shepherd of Marlowe, brooding upon the unattainable, has grown "very weary" of his life,' and meditates upon the theme of vanity with the unction of a Stephen Phillips. And his rough soldiers as they march, sing with Shellevan opulence of fancy--

Oh the Earth has fled to her walls.

She has cowered, and feared to die... "Gloria Mundi" is Wordsworthian pantheism in minor, cunningly condensed in the expression, evoking thought, yet somehow rather clever than convincing. Lastly "Pandora Sings" exquisitely with perfect modulation, perfect phrasing, perfect key, yet is it carping?--behind the tragic mask I somehow feel the dialectician other than the suffering creature.

Decidedly the number is serious, and should be taken seriously. Procul este, profanl!