The copyist group was gathered round
   A time-worn fresco, world-renowned,
   Whose central glory once had been
   The face of Christ, the Nazarene.

   And every copyist of the crowd
   With his own soul that face endowed,
   Gentle, severe, majestic, mean;
   But which was Christ, the Nazarene?

   Then one who watched them made complaint,
   And marvelled, saying, ’Wherefore paint
   Till ye be sure your eyes have seen
   The face of Christ, the Nazarene?’

And this sonnet is full of suggestion: 

   The wine-flushed monarch slept, but in his ear
      An angel breathed—­’Repent, or choose the flame
      Quenchless.’  In dread he woke, but not in shame,
   Deep musing—­’Sin I love, yet hell I fear.’

   Wherefore he left his feasts and minions dear,
      And justly ruled, and died a saint in name. 
      But when his hasting spirit heavenward came,
   A stern voice cried—­’O Soul! what dost thou here?’

   ’Love I forswore, and wine, and kept my vow
      To live a just and joyless life, and now
      I crave reward.’  The voice came like a knell—­
   ’Fool! dost thou hope to find again thy mirth,
   And those foul joys thou didst renounce on earth? 
      Yea, enter in!  My heaven shall be thy hell.’

Miss Constance Naden deserves a high place among our living poetesses, and this, as Mrs. Sharp has shown lately in her volume, entitled Women’s Voices, is no mean distinction.

Phyllis Browne’s Life of Mrs. Somerville forms part of a very interesting little series, called ’The World’s Workers’—­a collection of short biographies catholic enough to include personalities so widely different as Turner and Richard Cobden, Handel and Sir Titus Salt, Robert Stephenson and Florence Nightingale, and yet possessing a certain definite aim.  As a mathematician and a scientist, the translator and populariser of La Mecanique Celeste, and the author of an important book on physical geography, Mrs. Somerville is, of course, well known.  The scientific bodies of Europe covered her with honours; her bust stands in the hall of the Royal Society, and one of the Women’s Colleges at Oxford bears her name.  Yet, considered simply in the light of a wife and a mother, she is no less admirable; and those who consider that stupidity is the proper basis for the domestic virtues, and that intellectual women must of necessity be helpless with their hands, cannot do better than read Phyllis Browne’s pleasant little book, in which they will find that the greatest woman-mathematician of any age was a clever needlewoman, a good housekeeper, and a most skilful cook.  Indeed, Mrs. Somerville seems to have been quite renowned for her cookery.  The discoverers of the North-West Passage christened an island ‘Somerville,’ not as a tribute to the distinguished mathematician, but as a recognition of the excellence of some orange marmalade which the distinguished mathematician had prepared with her own hands and presented to the ships before they left England; and to the fact that she was able to make currant jelly at a very critical moment she owed the affection of some of her husband’s relatives, who up to that time had been rather prejudiced against her on the ground that she was merely an unpractical Blue-stocking.