If the sins of the reviewer are legion, so alas! are the provocations thereunto. It may therefore border perilously on the affected to exclaim, "Oh yes, we have been bored and bored but eccovi, here is a book that is different!" Et cetera.

However, let us risk it. Let us declare positively that this particular "Bok of Danish Verse" is different. What the exigencies of text and interpretation may have been, we do not know; we do not want to know. We know only that the translators, to summon Coleridge, "first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive," linked itself to natural poetic felicity and power. The rest, the process of gestation, the travail and torment, we prefer to surmise. For the present translators are, as they ought to be, poets--fundamentally-and poets, even the more, that they could so brood over adopted progeny as to persuade at least a second paternity. When we consider the indelible Danish bias of the original, the success of this venture is as buoyant as it is inspiring.

Every poem (the number is generous) in one way or another asserts the Dane. From Oehlenschlager, who is perhaps the most inexorably national, to Jensen, who is proudly nostalgic, the collection celebrates Denmark. Oehlenschlager sets the filial tradition. Everything must be Danish. for landscape, beech forest and the blue Sound.

There is a charming land

Where grow the wide-armed beeches

By the salt eastern Strand.

For epic characters, Northern Gods and Scandinavian heroes:

--search in the glooms

of mounded tombs,

On swords and shields

In ruined fields,

On Runic stones

Among crumbled bones.

Over the storms

The gods arise,

War-crimsoned forms

Stat-flashing eyes.

For lyric character, the sturdy Danish peasant and healthy Danish girl:

Fair women, comely maids.

Strong men and lads are dwelling

In Denmark's island glades.

There is Christian Winter with his poignantly brief melodic gesture:

We were so greatly alone.

We and our spirit

But as always the burdened heart, the homesick heart:

O to be Home! to be home in the distant

Beloved coast! . . .

There is Holger Drachmann with his outward insouciance, his interior delight in shocking a folk who secretly delight in being shocked-all cocked into roguishly droll, yet essentially sad, stanzas. The tongue i'-the cheek cannot quite outdo the tear-i'-the-eye:

Hello there! take your ragged hat

Old as the hills and tattered,

Toss it up to the ceiling first,

Then down to the floor, well-battered.

It is the north amused by its own eternal melancholy; it parallels the Slay in those rare moments of formidable relaxation.

And finally there is that massive cerebral imperialist, Johannes Jensen. He is as Danish as Oehlenschlager himself; but he takes his Denmark with him wherever he goes. He is vehemently modern, fiercely adroit, lofty in exaltation, merciless in displeasure. He detests Memphis, Tenn., U. S. A.

I stand and gnash my teeth

At Memphis Station. Tennessee.

It is raining.

Why are we held up hour upon hour?

And he gives us a new vision of Columbus:

Columbus, your withered age, and your hair whitened with frost.

Crown a Viking brow and a broken soul.

Columbus--Viking! An extraordinary conception; but then this is an extraordinary book, this Book of Danish Verse.