The second number of the Monthly comes out today, and it contains some very good reading. In fact, it is as entertaining a number of a college magazine as we remember to have seen. The stories in it are exactly what they should be and are excellent in their way. The first one, "The Awakening of Hargrave" is an interesting thing and well written. It is immensely improbable; in truth, when the heroine is supposed to be a Boston girl, it is absolutely impossible - but that makes it none the less entertaining. Hargraves, it must be admitted, are not everyday occurences at Harvard; we may do the same things but certainly on a smaller scale - for it would be more than slightly annoying to some of us to lose five hundred or so on the game. But it is a good story - notwithstanding.

"A Fair Exchange" is a jolly bit of writing and very well worked up. It is as brief and straightforward as it well could be and is assuredly delightful. It is really quite funny and as one thinks it over, one can not help laughing.

Mr. Lewis E. Gates has an article on the "Romantic Elements in Lord Tennyson's Poetry." The conclusions arrived at are summed up in the following paragraph:

"Tennyson, then, resembles the Romantic poets in his lack of sympathy with real life. He lived in a dream-world rather than in the world of real men and real women; and it is the dream-world, with its iridescence of beauty and its simplified and intensified characters, that he portrays for us in his poetry, save where he shows us the distorted pictures of life to be found in the minds of men half-mad with disappointed passion. His impatience of conventional life, his lack of interest in concrete character, and his intense subjectivity, mark him out closely akin to the Romantic poets, and as not having passed beyond the Romantic point of view and the Romantic mood in any such way as Browning, for example, passed beyond them. He was like the Romantic poets, too, in the fact that it was to nature he turned to find escape from the crude actualities of every-day life; and it is probably through his share in the great Romantic work of spiritualizeing nature that he will be most enduringly influential."

Another interesting study is found in the "Notes on Keats," which contain much that is appreciative. They are written rather attractively, too, although the article loses force by the trifling in the third part.

The verse of the number is entitled "The Siren's Isle" and "Tennyson."