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NY ONE who does us the honor to follow this department month by month may have been struck by the fact that most of the poems that we select for reprinting are from the less conspicuous periodicals. The names of the Forum, the Masses, the Bellman, the Mirror, Poetry, the Nautilus-to name a few-seem to recur more often than Harper's Monthly, Scribner's, the Century, Everybody's, McClure's and the Atlantic Monthly. This is not, of course, by design nor yet by accident. We see the poetry of all these magazines, and not once in a year, perhaps, are we refused the permission to reprint anything that we select for that purpose. What the fact seems to imply is either that the poets do not send their white-hot poems to the big magazines or that the editors do not want that kind but prefer those of a conventional type that conform to the more traditional "literary" standards. We are not looking for any particular brand of poetry. We are not faddists. The old-style poems look just as good to us as those written in vers libre. We are not searching for curios or freaks. What we try to find in poem is not novelty of form or even novelty of theme, but beauty, vitality, power, sincerity and carrying power, and it seems that we find the poems containing these qualities more often in the minor than in the major periodicals, and not infrequently in the dailies. The very essence of good poetry is spiritual freedom, and perhaps our bards feel less at liberty in writing for a periodical with many traditions and that represents a large

vested interest.

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The name of Amy Lowell is a comparatively new one in the list of American poets, but it is already one that excites interest. She is distinctly modern, not to say ultra-modern, and, tho a New England writer-her brother is president of Harvard-she trains with the Imagists and vers libre poets rather than with those who follow the New England school of the past. In her volume of poems recently published"Sword-Blades and Poppy Seed," Macmillan-we find much that is dramatic and of interest in other ways, but not much that is nourishing to the soul or evocative of the sense of beauty. The following is one of her best.

The ground is here and there bestud
With lumps of only part-burned coal.
His duty is to glean the whole,
To pick them from the filth, each one,
To hoard them for the hidden sun
Which glows within each fiery core
And waits to be made free once more.

Their sharp and glistening edges cut
His stiffened fingers. Through the smut
Gleam red the wounds which will not shut.
Wet through and shivering, he kneels
And digs the slippery coals-like eels
They slide about. His force all spent
He counts his small accomplishment:

A half-a-dozen clinker-coals
Which still have fire in their souls.
Fire! And in his thought there burns
The topaz fire of votive urns.
He sees it fling from hill to hill,
And, still consumed, is burning still.
Higher and higher leaps the flame,
The smoke an evershifting frame.
He sees a Spanish Castle old,
With silver steps and paths of gold.
From myrtle-bowers comes the plash
Of fountains, and the emerald flash
Of parrots in the orange trees,
Whose blossoms pasture humming bees.
He knows he feeds the urns whose smoke
Bears visions, that his master stroke
Is out of dirt and misery
To light the fire of poesy.

He sees the glory, yet he knows
That others cannot see his shows.
To them his smoke is sightless, black,
His votive vessels but a pack

Of old discarded shards, his fire

A peddler's; still to him the pyre
Is incensed, an enduring goal!
He sighs and grubs another coal.

Of a heart that feels no pain
At the sob of the autumn rain,
And takes no breath of glee
From the organ-surge of the sea,-
Of a mind where memory broods
Over songless solitudes!
I shall be satisfied
If only the dreams abide.

121

MADISON CAWEIN.

BY MARGARET STEELE ANDERSON. HE wind makes moan, the water runneth chill;

TH

I hear the nymphs go crying through the brake;

A new volume of poems appears from Clinton Scollard ("Poems," Houghton Mifflin Company) and, like all his work, it is filled with pleasing melody and pleasant fancies. Mr. Scollard never surprises or dazzles us, but neither does he ever, or at least very often, disap- And roaming mournfully from hill to hill point us. There are no brass instruments in his poetic orchestra and no organ tones. But his reed instruments and his violins are very tuneful and he knows how to play them.

The maenads all are silent for his sake!

He loved thy pipe, O wreathed and piping Pan!

So play'st thou sadly, lone within thine hollow;

He was thy blood, if ever mortal man, Therefore thou weepest - even thou, Apollo !

But O, the grieving of the Little Things, Above the pipe and lyre, throughout the woods!

The beating of a thousand airy wings, The cry of all the fragile multitudes!

The moth flits desolate, the tree-toad calls, Telling the sorrow of the elf and fay; The cricket, little harper of the walls, Puts up his harp-hath quite forgot to play!

And risen on these winter paths anew, The wilding blossoms make a tender sound;

The purple weed, the morning-glory blue, And all the timid darlings of the ground!

Here, here the pain is sharpest! For he walked

As one of these-and they knew naught This music that dared to enamor of fear,

But told him daily happenings and talked
Their lovely secrets in his listening ear!

Yet we do bid them grieve, and tell their
grief;

Else were they thankless, else were all untrue;

O wind and stream, O bee and bird and leaf,

Mourn for your poet, with a long adieu!

Louis Untermyer is himself a very militant sort of poet, but it is evident from his poem in the Masses that his militant Muse does not view with equanimity the blowing of men to bits with shrapnel or the laying waste of a peaceful countryside.

Of his jubilant sixty days!

Of the horror that crowded the dawn; Of a fragrant and peace-breathing lawn Turned to a roaring blaze;

Of frantic drums that blustered and beat A nightmare retreat;

Of the sickness, the death-dealing stenches; Of the blundering fight through the sleet Waist-high in the water-filled trenches. Of women ravished in a gust

Of horrible, hasty lust;
And children conceived with the crippling
weight

Of frenzied and cancerous hate. .
The dusk settling down like a blight,

Screening unnamable hordes;
Searchlights stabbing the night
With blinding and bodiless swords;

Of a sudden welter of cries

And death dropping down from the

skies. . .

What was your singing for?

The crowd with the clamor

It could not ignore. . . .
Go-with your falsetto roar;

Go-with your ready-made glamor.
Why should you stay here to gurgle and
stammer

Of war?

Here is another poem on war that strikes a different note. We find it in

the N. Y. Times:

THE SOLILOQUY OF AN OLD SOLDIER.

By O. C. A. CHILD.

OU need not watch for silver in your hair,

You

Or try to smooth the wrinkles from your eyes,

Or wonder if you're getting quite too spare,

Or if your mount can bear a man your size.

You'll never come to shirk the fastest flight,

To query if she really cares to dance, To find your eye less keen upon the sight, Or lose your tennis wrist or golfing

stance.

For you the music ceased on highest

note

Your charge had won, you'd scattered them like sand,

And then a little whisper in your throat, And you asleep, your cheek upon your hand.

Thrice happy fate, you met it in full cry, Young, eager, loved, your glittering world all joy—

You ebbed not out, you died when tide was high,

An old campaigner envies you, my boy!

We do not know whether the following poem has been published in any of the magazines. It came to us from the author printed on a card as a friendly token of the holiday season. It is in Mrs. Wilcox's best vein:

INTERLUDE.

BY ELLA WHEELER WILCOX.

Then let us clasp hands as we walk together,

And let us speak softly in love's sweet tone;

For no man knows on the morrow whether We two pass on-or but one alone!

What surprises us in the "Pagan Poems," by Franklin Henry Giddings (Macmillan), is not the fact that an eminent professor of sociology should take to the writing of verse, but that he should, when first appearing before the public in the guise of poet, display so many signs of having written a great deal of poetry. He exhibits a skill and freedom that can have come only from many an hour spent on the Parnassian Heights.

TH

The headstones thicken along the

way;

And life grows sadder, but love grows stronger,

For those who walk with us day by day.

The tear comes quicker, the laugh comes slower,

The courage is lesser to do and dare; And the tide of joy in the heart falls lower,

And seldom covers the reefs of care.

But all true things in the world seem truer,

And the better things of earth seem best,

And friends are dearer as friends are

fewer,

And love is all as our sun dips west.

Rest! O Rest!
Death shall bring thee!

In the Springfield Republican, which prints many poems evidently by tyros, appears every once in a while one that arrests attention by felicity of phrase or sentiment. The following is felicitous in both respects.

HELBYVILLE unanimously elected Judge Musgrove, Colonel Ledbetter, and the Squire to be the Town Board of Strategy and Committee on the Conduct of the War, with offices under the sourball tree on the Court-house Square. It will introduce you sufficiently to Shelbyville to say that to the Judge, the Colonel, and the Squire all military history, strategy, and tactics were not older nor younger by one day, nor greater in scope, than that part embraced in the four years' campaigns of the Army of Northern Virginia under one Robert E. Lee, a man highly spoken of in Shelbyville. Likewise, the years had stripped husk of historical fiction from the kernel of fact until it had been established in Shelbyville that of the Army of Northern Virginia Judge Musgrove solus was the center, while the Colonel, unaided, held the left wing, and the Squire, regiments, squadrons, and batteries in himself, had compassed the right. So Shelbyville, as one with a military past, was interested in the present war. Intelligence of hostilities was fetched to headquarters by the Judge's boy, Rabbit. By reason of common ancestry Rabbit bore a faithful, if helpless, resemblance to a Turco trooper. Rabbit was dispatched each morning to the station to wait for and grab the Judge's city newspaper, thrown from "the vestibule" as it slid through Shelbyville - without stopping. These communications having been transmitted to the Board's hands, the Judge read the progress of the war aloud, and the Colonel and the Squire followed with index fingers on a lithograph map, on which the North Sea had been compressed in a cartographical crime to allow for printed praises of a plug tobacco. If Sir John Rushworth Jellicoe had once seen that map, he would have sunk a small ship between the Skager Rack and the Orkneys and bottled up the Kaiser's fleet for good and all.

Τ

HE Judge pronounced German, French, Russian, and Belgian impartiality by the eye, adding more than usual mystification to official communiqués, but strategy suffered little thereby. The reading done, and preliminary views exchanged, the Committee on the Conduct of the War was ready to expand the theme of things military to the edification of Shelbyville, who dropped by, genial and interested, to listen. The Board saw no reason for moving its offices from the three hickory chairs under the sourball, where its members had settled all previous questions of politics, economics, and history, from the fall of man to the fall of the Republican party, in which events they found a close connection. They were in the vortex of Shelbyville's life, for the Court-house Square was marketplace and forum alike, and the town and county, willing to be instructed, had drunk deep for years of the spring of wisdom which flowed under the sourball. . . .

The Judge laid aside the newspaper and surveyed the square in meditative silence. Friends from three counties stopped to pass the time of day, but the Judge roused only for a moment to reply absent-mindedly, and seemed then to sink even lower in his chair. More than a few friends scanned anxiously the face under the old black felt hat, with its white beard and moustache trimmed after the approved Confederate veteran pattern, thinking that the Judge in this mood must be ill.

In a brief span his thoughts slid back easily over the fifty years. He saw his home-coming from the war, his marriage, and the day not long afterward that he had laid Mary and the baby under the cedars in the cemetery beyond the church. He was alone in the world now, and his work was done, save to fill his place in the kindly scheme of things in this little

town.

He rose suddenly.

"You gentlemen come up to my office," he said.

"Judge, you're not ailin', are you?" asked Colonel Ledbetter, surprised. "There's a sight of folks in town who'd like to chat with you."

The move from Paris to Bordeaux was not more momentous than this shift from the sourball's shade to the Judge's office over the hardware emporium. The Judge, for old time's sake, kept this room, with his name and "Attorney-at-Law" painted on the door, but its portals saw him in summer not oftener than the rain came and drove him and his friends from the square. . . .

"You gentlemen come on up with me," the Judge went on. "There's something real important I want to tell you."

H

E LED the way across the street, up the steps, and opened the door. "Drat that boy Rabbit," he exclaimed. "He hasn't been here to clean up this week." He pulled up the window sashes, and set sticks of stovewood to hold them up. When he turned, the other two had already found their accustomed chairs. Colonel Ledbetter, still believing that Judge Musgrove must be ailing, looked at him in surprise. The Judge kicked the spittoon within effective range. of all three, and sat down with the crumpled newspaper in his hand.

"This war's not goin' right," he began. "What's the matter with it?" demanded Colonel Ledbetter. "Nobody's quitting, eh?"

cently. "After McGowan's South Carolinians had closed in there wasn't room for any more if there had been a dozen millions. I remember-"

"You cert'nly did fight 'em, Colonel," interrupted the Judge kindly. "Now as to this war there's one piece in the paper I didn't read you. It's by a military writer in New York, the paper says. Just you listen to this now:

"American readers familiar with our own Civil War will not fail to observe the parallel between the tactics of Sir John French and those of General Lee before Richmond in 1864. The problems of Von Kluck are the same as those of Grant; with a stronger force he has attempted a ferocious frontal attack upon the English troops moving simultaneously upon Sir John French's left flank, to get between him and Paris. Just as Grant hurled himself savagely and ineffectively upon Lee in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, seeking at the same time to accomplish his flanking movement, and suffering terrific losses, so has Von Kluck sent his troops against the gallant English at Mons, Charleroi, at Cambrai and Le Cateau. Three times has Sir John held them off, and retired before the movement around his left flank. Indeed, it is to be believed that the English general has followed consciously the tactics employed by Lee in that remarkable campaign which kept Grant so long out of Richmond.'

T

HE Judge finished and the Colonel and the Squire looked at him inquiringly.

"Well," observed the Colonel, "if that gentleman's fighting like General Lee he'll win, won't he? I'm not acquainted with the French family, but I reckon he comes of real good people."

"If that's the way John French is fighting," said the Judge decisively, “I think there ought to be some one over there to tell him just how General Lee would do it."

He went on before the others had time to answer this remark.

"I've thought it all out down on the square. One of you gentlemen 'd be best to do it," he added generously, "havin' had such a part in General Lee's victories. But, Colonel, there's Miss Cassie and the children for you to look after, and your rheumatism's been real troublesome lately, I know. The Squire's got a public office in this town and he can't be spared"-the Squire now held no higher office than notary public. "There's nary a soul that's leanin' on me for support or comfort. Times come when the house gets right lonely evenings. It doesn't come easy to leave Shelbyville and the pleasant society of you gentlemen, but I reckon it's a sort of duty, and I'm aimin' to set out. When I get to John French's camp, we'll rename that whole heathen country with Virginian Christian names so I'll know the place better, and we'll lick that Kluck

from the Rappahannock to the James, the same as General Lee."

It was supper time before the Shelbyville War Board adjourned from the Judge's office. Colonel Ledbetter and the Squire left the Judge at the gate, and turned and watched him as he walked, unconsciously with more erect carriage, up the shaded path to the porch. The Colonel spoke a little wistfully, a little doubtfully, but confidently.

"It ain't scarcely according to President Wilson's ideas of neutrality to give all that help to one side," he said. "But there was considerable of the Dutch among the Yankees. Maybe it's the way that justice and retribution was meant to come."

The next day the station agent flagged "the vestibule" and Shelbyville sent its fighting contingent to the front.

L

OOK the next time as you walk, ride, or drive by the Plaza at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue at the statue of

General Sherman, where he rides always toward the South on his bronze horse with Miss Victory leading him on. Sherman going southward is a subject calculated to produce a strong emotional reaction in persons from a section of the country where he gained some notoriety for his riding. But the sculptor, Saint-Gaudens, chose to employ a piece of symbolism which heightens a Georgian's emotional reaction to a point approaching frenzy. Underneath the horse's feet is a spray of Georgia pine.

So it was that Judge Musgrove, shaking his stick at General Sherman on the bronze horse, and offering to fight the whole war over again for the sake of that spray of Georgia pine, did not see the taxicab swinging out from the park. The chauffeur jammed on his brakes as he caught sight of an elderly gentleman in his path, dressed in old-fashioned raiment and carrying a gripsack. He was too late. The Judge went down under the wheels. The grip-sack, sent careening, flew to the protection of a gamin who thought it providentially sent and departed; accordingly the paragraph in the Times next morning noted only that an aged and unidentified man had been taken to the hospital unconscious after being struck by a taxicab.

TH

HREE weeks later the interne in the hospital left the bedside of the Judge and reported to his chief. There was a queer look in his eye and inside of him a feeling of indecision whether to laugh or be solemn. Yet only six months before he had been one of those callow ambulance surgeons whom you see sitting nonchalantly on the back seat the while you always imagine that the victim is dying inside.

"See here," he blurted out, "that old fellow in the ward came to just nowfound his memory and told me the whole blooming story. Says he's Judge Mus

grove-one of the Shelbyville Musgroves down South. Says he fought with Lee and he was on his way to tell Sir John French how to run the war and lick the Germans. Says too that we mustn't let 'em know in Shelbyville-they think he's already on the battle line—and he's going over as soon as we can get him up. Now. what d'ye think of that?"

The Super listened while the interne retold the story.

"I guess it's not you," the Super said. "You told it twice the same. It must be him for the psychopathic ward. I'll see.”

"By the way," added the interne, "I think it was the sight of a darky in the bed next him that brought back his memory. I've moved all the black ones out of the ward now and quieted him down."

The Super heard the story from the Judge's lips, and met the interne outside.

"We'll pull him through first," he said very thoughtfully, "and then-well, I'd hate to send him back to the Colonel and the Squire with anything less than a discharge from an army field hospital."

The days slipped by and the Judge exchanged the Squire and the Colonel for the Super and the interne as his boon companions. Then one evening very quickly the Judge followed the enemy over the river that is beyond the James and the Pamunkey and all rivers, and the attend

ants bore him out.

The interne sought the Super.

"We'll notify Shelbyville now," the Super said, "but-" and he looked away absently.

"That's what I was thinking," answered the interne hopefully. "I've got a friend down at one of the consulates. He'll give me a sheet of paper or something sort of official, you know."

The Super looked at him gratefully. "You'd better go now," he said. "I'll be thinking up a piece."

N THE way down-town the interne had another idea. No matter if it wasn't a Victoria Cross or the Legion of Honor that some exile had sold for bread in the Bowery pawnshop—it was a military decoration fit for a soldier. Then he and the Super sat up for long hours that night and composed a document which isn't in the files of the hospital records. It was upon a piece of paper with a crown and a seal at the top, and read:

"His Majesty's Government beg to inform the relatives of Langdon Cheves Musgrove, brevet-colonel in his Majesty's Own Guard, that he died gallantly on the field of battle as befits a soldier. For conspicuous service and valor and a meritorious gallantry, his Majesty has been pleased to bestow a decoration upon Colonel Musgrove, and to restore his body to his relatives and friends with special honors."

And "the vestibule" stopped again, and Shelbyville took its warrior home.