examples of his keen wit, kindly humor, and purposeful and valuable literary and dramatic criticism. In fact he stands as the founder of the feuilleton in his own country, establishing through his wide culture a standard for that class of writing far above any of his contemporaries in France and Germany.
The sorrow he experienced through the death of a beautiful woman whom he loved, he tried to forget in numerous trips to foreign lands, memories of which he has left in his superb sketches from Vienna, Istria, Dalmatia and other Balkan states, Italy, Constantinople, Egypt, Palestine, France, Germany. Later he wrote short stories, sketches and criticisms until the illness which had been creeping on him for years made further literary work impossible.
Ever since the publication of his first book of poems, Neruda has had a field of his own in his frank confessions, tinged with irony and temperate, cold scepticism not typical of youth. His second work, “A Book of Verses,” was received with far more favor by a public which was now keener in its appreciation. Some of the poems in this collection, such as his “Lines to My Mother,” have become national lyrics and ballads. His “Kosmické Písně” (Cosmic Songs) are at times simple lyrics, again reverent national hymns with here and there the genuinely earnest longings of a great soul to humanize the mysteries of the universe and make its workings more intimate by an analogy between the fate of little nations and of great powers,
