Sonnet 65 by Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No worst, there is none,” has been criticized by Yvor Winters in the Hudson Review (Winter 1949) as an instance of late romantic emotional over-emphasis without a statement of the generating concept, of the motive, of the nature of the experience. Hopkins, says Winters, “cannot move us by telling us why he himself is moved”; therefore the poet urges, in effect, “ ‘Share my fearful emotion, for the human mind is subject to fearful emotions’.” Hopkins' skill in metaphor and in metric variation succeeds in stirring the reader occasionally, admits Winters, but since we are being led “blindfold into violence,” the poem becomes a “violation of our integrity.”

The Accompanying table gives the most recent data obtainable on the extent to which foreign languages are offered and studied in public secondary schools in the United States. The last national survey was made by the U. S. Office of Education in 1948–49, and comparisons are made with the results of this survey to show the subsequent gain or loss in each state for which more recent figures could be obtained. For some states the data are incomplete because the state department of education does not know, and apparently does not care to find out, what the pupils in the high schools are currently studying. In seventeen states, the information existed only on reports filed by each high school, and it was assembled through the help of foreign language teachers who went to the state department of education and spent days tabulating the reports.

On a monday morning in February 1843, Eduard Mörike enjoyed a unique musical experience, significant alike for its evocation of past memories and its foreshadowing of subsequent literary creation. He was at the home of David Friedrich Strauß in Sontheim, on the edge of Heilbronn. Strauß and another of Mörike's boyhood friends, the composer Friedrich Kauffmann, had surprised Mörike in Cleversulzbach the preceding Saturday and taken him to meet Strauß's bride, the former operatic mezzo-soprano Agnes Schebest. The sensational career which Agnes had sacrificed for marriage to Mörike's friend, reports of her beauty and “demonic charm,” rumors concerning her personal life in the past, and indications of Strauß's restlessness in marriage had made Mörike look forward to this introduction for some months with tense anticipation. But the first twenty-four hours of the visit had now passed happily, rich in the spontaneous sociability and informal musical enjoyment that Mörike so passionately loved. Just a few minutes earlier the unexpected arrival of Klärchen Mörike in a peasant costume had completely mystified all of the company but her brother.

Eighteen department chairmen from seventeen universities met in five sessions at MLA headquarters on Saturday and Sunday, 26 and 27 March 1955, to discuss problems in the recruitment and preparation of college teachers of modern foreign languages. The universities represented had, during the past five years, awarded a total of more than 400 Ph.D. degrees in Germanic and Romance languages. Participants in the meeting are named on page 64 of this report.

George Eliot's biographers and critics are generally aware of the important role George Henry Lewes played as her literary adviser. They describe how he helped her to develop her literary powers by means of his affection and sympathy. But the real extent of Lewes' influence in this connection has not been determined.

Uring wordsworth's lifetime, the epic lost a good deal of its prestige in England. One reason was of course the growing tendency to regard literature not as static and unchanging but as essentially organic and evolutionary. Believing that a principle of progress is secretly operative in the mind of man and therefore in the things he writes, many critics were now disposed to brand the epic as an outmoded form of literature and to censure earlier neo-classicists for their high praise of this particular genre. They suggested that, for the modern world at least, there is considerably more of worth and of interest in the spontaneous self-expression of the lyric and in the skillful character-probing of the Elizabethan drama and of the modern novel.

On 27 September 1871 there appeared in an inconspicuous corner of the New York Tribune a piece by Mark Twain entitled “The Revised Catechism.” Obviously drawing on his Sunday School memories of the Westminster Catechism for the form of the contribution, Clemens makes use also of the Bible (a work thoroughly learned in his boyhood and never forgotten) for striking satirical effect. “The Revised Catechism” is a scathing denunciation of Boss Tweed and his associates—as accomplished a group of rascals as ever pillaged a public treasury—and at the same time an indictment of the age that permitted such men to thrive. The story of the Tammany Ring is too well known to need retelling here; but to make clear the reasons that led Mark Twain to the writing of his satire and to demonstrate the ironical character of his references, so apposite to the day and hour, it is necessary to consider briefly the part played in the exposure of the Ring by its two principal antagonists—one, the cartoonist, Thomas Nast, and the other, the New York Times.

Although Middleton Murry, Swift's latest biographer, treats his subject with grateful sympathy and respect, he has, like every other writer on the problem, ignored the amazing consistency which framed Swift's relations with women. Yet the pattern need only be pointed out to be perceived, for it is recurrent, unusual (if not unique), and extraordinarily illuminating. Naturally enough, it is a pattern which originates in the author's childhood.

What has made john henry newman so much more interesting to students of literature than most of his religious contemporaries is the rare blend in him of the artist, the intellectual, and the gentleman with the profoundly religious temper which judges the ultimate value of all activity in its movement towards or away from God. Whether it be called Christian humanism or some other name, it was a difficult balance that he sought to keep; and he has left us in his private papers a frank record of his struggles. The rich integration he eventually did achieve was the great source of his attraction for so different a contemporary in some respects as Matthew Arnold, for example, who ranked Newman with Goethe, Wordsworth, and Sainte-Beuve among the principal influences on his own development. At the outset of his career, however, Newman was being torn and pulled in opposite directions; and it is more than doubtful that he could ever have gained his equilibrium if he had not been elected a Fellow of Oriel College on 12 April 1822: “the turning point of his life,” as he would one day rightly call it, “and of all days most memorable.”

A few scholars have long puzzled over the fact that some of the unauthorized editions of Shelley's poems which were published after Posthumous Poems (London, 1824, edited by Mrs. Shelley) contain better readings at certain points than that volume, readings which do not appear in an authorized text until Mrs. Shelley published The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1839 (London, four vols.). Robert Browning noticed this in a letter addressed to H. Buxton Forman, dated 2 July 1877, in which he says of the fifth line of “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples,” omitted in the body of the text of 1824, “The line was first restored in a strange edition of Shelley published by Benbow in 1826; and Leigh Hunt, in 1828, quotes the poem without it, remarking on its loss: and it was myself who told him of its existence, to his surprise and pleasure.” Frederick A. Pottle, who quotes from Browning's letter in his Shelley and Browning (Chicago, 1923, p. 14), wonders how it was that Benbow obtained the missing line (p. 83). My investigation of this problem, instigated by Pottle, has led to two surprising discoveries: first, that all the modern editors of Shelley's text have failed to notice an errata leaf to Posthumous Poems which is present in some copies still extant, and, secondly, that there are important relationships between certain of the unauthorized editions which followed Posthumous Poems and Mrs. Shelley's text of 1839. These relationships, in fact, call into question the textual value of a large number of readings hitherto believed to be original to the first edition of 1839.

In the spring of 1955, questionnaires (requesting information concerning modern foreign language offerings in 1955–56, foreign language entrance and degree requirements, and foreign language faculty) were sent to 281 undergraduate institutions accredited for teacher training.1All replied, but in some cases catalogues were consulted to supplement or clarify questionnaire data. For this survey the institutions were grouped into three homogeneous categories: (A) independent teachers colleges (108 four-year institutions whose names specify a teacher-training purpose and which are not constituents of a university2); (B) university schools of education (72 four-year institutions, variously designated as schools of education, colleges of education, or, rarely, teachers colleges, which are constituents of a community of colleges and professional schools); (C) other colleges accredited for teacher-training (101 four-year institutions which seem to emphasize a liberal arts or technical program, but also feature approved courses of study for teacher-candidates).

“Cause Inconnue.” Ces mots flagellent. Les voici bien inscrits dans une colonne du registre de la Morgue où tombèrent quelques renseignements secs sur le suicide présumé de Gérard de Nerval. C'est une excellente conclusion; et qui pourrait couper court à bien des querelles. Faut-il pourtant que cette position de repli nous soit elle-même refusée? L'idée du suicide accueillie par une poignée de fonctionnaires, résolument sinon en tout état de cause (quand une autre colonne interroge “suicide ou homicide,” il faut bien répondre), n'a cessé, en effet, d'être remise en question.

For many generations symbolism has dominated the poetry of America and Europe. In time, of course, the critics found out what was happening and they began to investigate the movement. They have carried their investigations further and further afield over the literature of the last four centuries and in the process they have enormously widened our knowledge of poetry. Through their labors we read with clearer eyes and a deeper enjoyment than before.

Wordsworth's love of freedom and independence is an ingredient in nearly all his best poetry. In his passages of highest elevation, when the language becomes richly connotative and evocative, the individual at the center stands untrammeled in the open air. Merely to take the subject of liberty was not, of course, to eliminate the chance of mediocre verse—Wordsworth forced undistinguished rimes on liberty as on other subjects—but on this subject, inevitably frequent, and with this impulse, present in all the happiest moments of his life, he achieved his furthest creative reaches. Without any effort to review or to discuss the chronological development of his ideas on political liberty, or to examine his political or social views at all, the following pages attempt to cast some light on the way ideas and feelings of personal liberty operate in Wordsworth's poems. The first section treats these ideas and feelings necessarily with some reference to chronological changes and to inter-weavings with love of political liberty; but the emphasis, as in Section ri on the range and variety of Wordsworth's libertarian imagery, is on his continuing interest in individual freedom.

This is a third revision of statistics first published in the Supplement to the September 1953 number of PMLA. The original listing was based on institutions offering the B.A. degree and listed as accredited in the American Council on Education's American Universities and Colleges, 1952. The present revision includes institutions subsequently accredited and corrections in the original listing. All except those italicized have a foreign language requirement for all candidates for the B.A. degree. Those starred require foreign languages for all candidates for entrance.

Among the reviews of poetry in the early nineteenth century few have been more celebrated, or more notorious, than the review of Coleridge's Christabel which appeared in the Edinburgh Review for September 1816. The Quarterly on Keats, Mr. Blackwood's young men on the Cockney School, Jeffrey's “This will never do” of the Excursion, and the Edinburgh Review's indirect and unwitting gift to the world of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers—perhaps only these have had greater fame, of sorts. The destroyers of new poets may have had an inkling of the vengeance of posterity, for the authorship of some of these reviews was a mystery exceptionally well preserved even for that age of anonymous criticism. Time, however, and amateur detectives have succeeded in fixing the responsibility for most of them; the review of Christabel is the chief remaining puzzle.

The Scarlet Letter explores the effects, on the transgressors, of three distinct types of sin—the revealed sin of Hester, the concealed sin of Dimmesdale, and the unpardonable sin of Chillingworth. The complexity of these effects is suggested when Hester, outwardly penitent, exclaims to Dimmesdale that their deed had a consecration of its own, or when Dimmesdale, spiritually tormented by his hidden guilt, finds his power for good in the community increased as a result of his transgression, or when Chillingworth becomes, through his demonic pursuit of revenge, the greatest sinner of them all, and is assigned, finally, to eternal damnation in Hawthorne's special hell reserved for those of his villains who commit the sin for which there is no forgiveness.