at Paris, among a living crowd.  But Gautier is a colorist, an artist with words, and he is at his best when he works without much outline, celebrating draperies, bouquets and laces, to all of which he can give a meaning quite other than the milliner’s, as where he asserts that the plaits of a rose-colored dress are “the lips of my unappeased desires,” or describes March as a barber, powdering the wigs of the blossoming almond trees, and a valet, lacing up the rosebuds in their corsets of green velvet.  Whatever he touches he leaves artificial, “enameled,” yet charming.  The verses added in the present edition are more pensive, even sombre.  A life given to art wholly, without patriotism or religion or philosophy, does not prepare the greenest old age.  There is a long and beautiful poem, “Le Chateau du Souvenir,” which he fills, not exactly with Charles Lamb’s “old familiar faces,” but with portraits of his mistresses and of his old self.  There is the “Last Vow”—­to a woman he has pursued “for eighteen years,” and whom he still accosts, though “the white graveyard lilacs have blossomed about my temples, and I shall soon have them tufting and shading all my forehead.”  There is also the accent of his irresponsible courtiership, the facile and unashamed flattery he paid to such a woman as Princess Mathilde.  This personage was, or is, an artist; and we may not be mistaken in believing that we have seen, cast aside in the vast storerooms of Haseltine’s galleries in this city—­an example and gnomon of disenchanted glory—­her water-color sketch called the “Fellah Woman,” and the very one of which Gautier sang:  “Caprice of a fantastic brush and of an imperial leisure!...  Those eyes, a whole poem of languor and pleasure, resolve the riddle and say, ‘Be thou Love—­I am Beauty.’”

The late poems, however, as well as the old, are filled with felicities.  They contain many a lesson of the word-master, who, though he did not attain the Academy, left the French language gold, which he found marble.  The ornaments, exquisite licenses, foreign graces and wide researches which Gautier conferred upon his mother-tongue have enriched it for future time, and they are best seen in this volume.

* * * * *

Concord Days.  By A. Bronson Alcott.  Boston:  Roberts Brothers.

In these loose leaves we have the St. Martin’s summer of a life.  Mr. Alcott, from his quiet home in Concord, and from the edifice of his seventy-three years, picks out those mental growths and moral treasures which have kept their color through all the changes of the seasons.  They bear the mark of selection, of choice, from out a vast abundance of material:  to us readers the scissors have probably been a kinder implement than the pen.  Be that as it may, the selections given are all worth saving, and the fragmentary resurrection is just about as much as our age has time to attend to of the growths that were formed when New England thought was young.  That was the day