A Two themes welded in perfect harmony will tell the story of our poet's life, music and love. Music-born with him, descending to him by a long line of inheritance, his life-long passion; love, broad, catholic and unfathomable, the source of his real living and the key note of his character. Love, the core of his inmost being, the very marrow of his daily thought. Music, the flower of his daily life and the fittest utterance of his secret soul. By good right, too, could he lay claim to the gift of music. In the days of good Queen Bess, one Jerome Lanier, a Huguenot refugee had been kindly received in England and he repaid this kindness by giving to England's sovereign his talents and by bequeathing to her successors, James I. and the First Charles, the talents of his gifted son, Nicholas.

William Heyse places as a motto on the title-page of his ‘Mecklenbörger Burhochtid’ the following lines:

Certain languages and dialects all over the world—Catalan, Italian, German, Algonkian—relieve themselves from the charge that each is “a bush where no birds sing”, by presenting a peculiar development of diminutives, which gives the speech a noticeable “Klink un Klank”.

‘La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne,’ published by Henry Alfred Todd in vol. iv, Nos. 3 and 4 of the Publications of The Modern Language Association of America, a publication deservedly valued and supplemented as to the introduction, with many important additions by Gaston Paris in the Romania, vol. xix, pp. 314-335, is the earliest version of the legend of the “Children changed into Swans,” contained in the French Cycle of the Crusade. It is not without any interest that the three French versions of this legend have been published in an inverse order of their origin. The younger version, published by Reiffenberg, was followed by Hippeau's publication of the middle version, both connected with the other branches of the Cycle of the Crusade. That now the earliest French version has been published, is of great importance to the scientific understanding of this interesting legend.

The Saga of Walther of Aquitaine, or of Walther and Hildegunde, is preserved in a variety of versions: Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Middle High German, Old Norse, Polish, all but one of which (Waltharius) are brief or fragmentary in their present form. The original texts of these various versons are reproduced in the following pages in chronological order, so as to present the Saga in its transmitted form which may serve as a basis for historical treatment.

Everything concerning French Louisiana seems at this time to possess an interest for the public; and it has been my purpose in some measure, to give an account of its language, its literature, its dialects, its folklore and its inhabitants. My papers published in the Transactions of our Modern Language Association have been so kindly received that I feel encouraged to continue my labors in a field vast and fertile but difficult to explore. The work to be done is, to a great extent, one of original research and of patient investigation, and it will require several years to present a tolerably complete tableau of picturesque French Louisiana. I now desire to present another feature of the picture by giving a brief sketch of the Acadians and their dialect. It may not be amiss to begin this study by taking a bird's-eye view of the history of Acadia, from the settlement of the colony to the dispersion of the inhabitants. We shall then accompany Evangeline to the beautiful banks of the Teche and follow her canoe and that of Gabriel as they glide along its placid waters, leaving scarcely a ripple on the gentle stream which, the names of the unhappy lovers have rendered immortal.

The trend of the Modern Language Association has been, thus far, almost exclusively in the direction of grammatical criticism and philological exegesis. The literary side of language has been subordinated or retired until it is almost faded out of memory, in the confusion of tongues and the strife of phonetics. Nearly all of the illustrating power, the æsthetic brilliance of literary culture, is lost upon the philological devotee. As an attempt to counteract this tendency, I purpose a special investigation of some points suggested by the study of one of the noblest works through which the spiritual genius and the artistic sense of our age has expressed itself—I mean Tennyson's “In Memoriam.” As is well known to students of our literature, “In Memoriam “appeared in 1850, the year of Wordsworth's death and of Tennyson's succession to the office of Laureate. It is one of the five or six supreme elegiac poems of our language, “Lycidas “standing first in point of time (1637), then Dryden's “Ode on Mrs. Killigrew” (1686), then Shelley's “Adonais “(1822), suggested by the death of Keats and “In Memoriam “which was occasioned by the death of Arthur Hallam at Vienna in September, 1833—in 1850. Matthew Arnold's “Thyrsis,” evoked by the death of his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, in point of grace and tenderness is entitled to most honorable recognition, but as it is subsequent by several years to the appearance of “In Memoriam,”