The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-01-29
Periodicals of High Quality

lack statistics to bear me out, but if is reasonable to say that a larger num- Der of high class magazines are pub lished in the United States than in any other country in the world. The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Scribner's and the Century, to say nothing of magazines es- tablished in recent years, were ably edited and singularly attractive five years ago, but they seem even more excellent to- day Of periodicals patterned somewhat after the Nineteenth Century of London our North American Review will compare with any similar publication in the old country. It grows better and better each year.
 periodical which I read with much pleasure and profit in my youth was The Eclectic It was made up, as it's title suggested, of selected articles-essays se- lected from English magazines. have not seen a copy for many years; suppose it has been discontinued. I read regularly The Fortnightly Review, The Edinburgh Re view and The Nineteenth Century and After. My favorite is The Nineteenth Century. 1t is a model review in every respect. Almost every subject of human interest is discussed in that periodical, and every article is discussed by writer who carries conviction. Although wide variety is h feature of The Nineteenth Century, nearly all the articles-polltical, theological and literary-are such as would interest the average layman In copy of recent date 1 found a charming paper, Shelley at Tan -yr-allt," written by Mar garet l.. Woods. Every person of culture, I believe, is fascinated by Shelley poetry. But the article referred to Is well worth reading for its beauty of style, to say nothing of the interest one might feel in the poet. When the English essayists do write belles-lettres they are pre- eminent This article on the poet at Tan y~-allt is something that Ruskin might have been proud to have written. Every paragraph picturing the beautiful in nature is a prose poem. Here is the opening:
 "Of the four great poets of the early nineteenth century, only one, Words worth, sings out of the heart of an Eng fish landscape. We do not as it were run up against Keats in Hampstead; although we can without an effort perceive the shade of Fanny Brawne-dozens of shades of dozens of Fanny Brawnes-ogling young druggists in the neighborhood Of Round Pond. Keats had no terrestrial country His is the classic Fairyland of Claude and of Turner; landscape in which nymphs are discerned. Two gener- ations of our poets vowed themselves to Italy, yet Browning is the only one of them whose poetry would lose something essential if the poet had never passed the Alps A plaster cast in a museum might have inspired Byron's Dying Glad iator as effectually as the mediocre orig inal. Greece was the source of his highest inspiration and after Greece, the Lake of Geneva, or rather the electric per sonality of Shelley, with whom he felt it's beauty. And Shelley2 In spite of lines written among the Euganean hills and one or two other poems of Italy, Shelley s muse is not definitely Italian. She Is d creature of the ambient air. water, the clouds, wind alive rather to the large beauties of the general earth than to special and local features. His Naples lacks the great cone of Vesuvius which seemed formerly as necessary to it's back ground as Fuji Yama to that of Jap anese sketch. Yet he has seized the whole spirit of Athenian landscape in one stanza of the Ode to Freedom, that of the ruins and deserts of Egypt in the 30 lines of Ozymandias: and this although he had never trodden the soil of Greece or of Egypt.
 Mountains, with the wide harmonies of light and colour, mist and shadow, which the sky breathes over them, were inti- mates of ShelleyS soul before ever he saw the Alps or the Apennines. It was the mountains ofNhis own country, of the English lakes and of Wales, which first stored his mipd with images of ever lasting, everehanging mountain beauty. These render the harmonies of the sky with delicacy. an elusive charm all their own. The hulking giants of Switzerland often wall out far too large a part of the heavens and are dull and monotonous in colour and texture, except where lakes lend them space and wrap vestures of purple about their feet. The mountains. of dry hot countries, precisely owing to their aridity, reflect with emphasis the blue and rose and gold of morning and evening and the blackness of storm clouds. At close quarters and in ordinary daylight, they are coourless as bare bones. But the mountains of our misty islands are clothed as in finest brod- cry, are so rich in various colours of their own that in the nearest view and on the dullest day they feed the eye with end- less variety of lovely detail. Actual size is rarely great factor in mountain beau ty, and comparatively small though it is, there are in the world but few prospects of peak and crag, of wood and water so satisfying as that of the estuary of the Glaslyn where the boy Shelley once found a home"