The publication of The Blue Bird a year or two ago, and later its successful presentation on the stage, has awakened new interest in an author whose fame and influence seemed somewhat on the wane. It is now some twenty years since a little volume of essays by Maurice Maeterlinck caused the author to be proclaimed with a flourish of French trumpets as the “Belgian Shakespeare,” the “European Emerson,” and the “greatest mystic of the age.” And these epithets and designations were not without some reason. The Treasure of the Humble, which helped to call them out, became of genuine soul-value to many people who could lay no claim to that particular virtue. The author's later essays, too, were conceived in a somewhat similar vein.