The re-publication of Miss Waterhouse's symposium of prose and poetry, a ‘little bundle of thoughts’ as she herself calls it, takes for granted the relationship between literature and life. When this book was first published in 1902 it was still fairly widely agreed that literature and any form of art did touch human life and should be expected to touch human life at many points. Although Walter Pater and many like him had lived and written, the ‘Art for Art's Sake’ creed had not borne its full fruit. Now almost fifty years later this same book sees the light again in a world that thinks very differently. Today it is commonly taken for granted that poetry exists primarily in its own right and may only be judged on its own terms. It was indeed very necessary after the excess of ‘moral’ literary criticism to re-establish the natural rights of poetry.