Part 9

They prophesied ruin ere man was made; “Such folly must surely fail!” And when he was done, “Do you think, my Lord, He’s better without a tail?”

And still in the honest working world, With posture and hint and smirk, These sons of the devil are standing by While man does all the work.

They balk endeavor and baffle reform, In the sacred name of law; And over the quavering voice of Hem Is the droning voice of Haw.

DAISIES

Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune I saw the white daisies go down to the sea, A host in the sunshine, an army in June, The people God sends us to set our hearts free.

The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell, The orioles whistled them out of the wood; And all of their singing was, “Earth, it is well!” And all of their dancing was, “Life, thou art good!”

_Richard Burton_

Richard (Eugene) Burton was born at Hartford, Connecticut, March 14, 1861. He has taught English at various colleges and universities since 1888, and has been head of the English department of the University of Minnesota since 1906. His first book, _Dumb in June_ (1895), is, in many ways, his best. It contains a buoyant lyricism, a more conscious use of the strain developed in Carman and Hovey’s _Songs from Vagabondia_—a mood which he has never surpassed. Much of his other verse is far less distinctive, being what might be called “anonymous poetry”: a poetry that has, in spite of certain excellent qualities, little trace of the individual and practically no stamp of personality or place. The succeeding _Lyrics of Brotherhood_ (1899) has a wider vision if a more limited music; several of the poems in this collection reflect the hungers, dreams and unsung melodies of the dumb and defeated multitudes. _From the Book of Life_ (1909) has scarcely as much power and less poetry.

Besides his verse, Burton has written several books of essays, a life of Whittier and various volumes on the drama.

BLACK SHEEP

From their folded mates they wander far, Their ways seem harsh and wild; They follow the beck of a baleful star, Their paths are dream-beguiled.

Yet haply they sought but a wider range, Some loftier mountain-slope, And little recked of the country strange Beyond the gates of hope.

And haply a bell with a luring call Summoned their feet to tread Midst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfall And the lurking snare are spread.

Maybe, in spite of their tameless days Of outcast liberty, They’re sick at heart for the homely ways Where their gathered brothers be.

And oft at night, when the plains fall dark And the hills loom large and dim, For the Shepherd’s voice they mutely hark, And their souls go out to him.

Meanwhile, “Black sheep! Black sheep!” we cry, Safe in the inner fold; And maybe they hear, and wonder why, And marvel, out in the cold.

_Oliver Herford_

Oliver Herford was born in December, 1863, at Manchester, England. He studied art in London and at Julien’s in Paris, turned to literature as a pastime and, about 1890, came to the United States, where he has lived ever since.

Herford, celebrated as a wit as well as a draughtsman and versifier, is the author of no less than twenty volumes of light verse, prose pasquinades and burlesques. His _The Bashful Earthquake_ (1898), _Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten_ (1904) and _This Giddy Globe_ (1919) show Herford’s delicate skill and his versatile dexterity. These volumes, like most of Herford’s, are embellished by his own drawings, which are fully as graceful as the accompanying verses.

EARTH[15]

If this little world to-night Suddenly should fall through space In a hissing, headlong flight, Shrivelling from off its face, As it falls into the sun, In an instant every trace Of the little crawling things— Ants, philosophers, and lice, Cattle, cockroaches, and kings, Beggars, millionaires, and mice, Men and maggots all as one As it falls into the sun.... Who can say but at the same Instant from some planet far, A child may watch us and exclaim: “See the pretty shooting star!”

THE ELF AND THE DORMOUSE

Under a toadstool crept a wee Elf, Out of the rain to shelter himself.

Under the toadstool, sound asleep, Sat a big Dormouse all in a heap.

Trembled the wee Elf, frightened and yet Fearing to fly away lest he get wet.

To the next shelter—maybe a mile! Sudden the wee Elf smiled a wee smile.

Tugged till the toadstool toppled in two. Holding it over him, gaily he flew.

Soon he was safe home, dry as could be. Soon woke the Dormouse—“Good gracious me!

“Where is my toadstool?” loud he lamented. —And that’s how umbrellas first were invented.

_Richard Hovey_

Richard Hovey was born in 1864 at Normal, Illinois, and graduated from Dartmouth in 1885. After leaving college, he became, in rapid succession, a theologian, an actor, a journalist, a lecturer, a professor of English literature at Barnard, a poet and a dramatist.

His first volume, _The Laurel: An Ode_ (1889), betrayed the overmusical influence of Lanier and gave promise of that extraordinary facility which often brought Hovey perilously close to the pit of mere technique. His exuberant virility found its outlet in the series of poems published in collaboration with Bliss Carman—the three volumes of _Songs from Vagabondia_ (1894, 1896, 1900). Here he let himself go completely; nothing remained sober or static. His lines fling themselves across the page; dance with intoxicating abandon; shout with a wild irresponsibility; leap, laugh, carouse and carry off the reader in a gale of high spirits. The famous _Stein Song_ is but an interlude in the midst of a far finer and even more rousing poem that, with its flavor of Whitman, begins:

I said in my heart, “I am sick of four walls and a ceiling. I have need of the sky. I have business with the grass. I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling, Lone and high, And the slow clouds go by. I will get me away to the waters that glass The clouds as they pass....”

Hovey’s attitude to his art may be expressed in no better way than his own words concerning the poet: “It is not his mission,” wrote Hovey in the _Dartmouth Magazine_, “to write elegant canzonettas for the delectation of the _dilettanti_, but to comfort the sorrowful and hearten the despairing, to champion the oppressed and declare to humanity its inalienable rights, to lay open to the world the heart of man—all its heights and depths, all its glooms and glories, to reveal the beauty in things and breathe into his fellows a love of it.” This almost too conscious awareness of the poet’s “mission” often marred Hovey’s work; in responding to his program, he frequently overstressed his ringing enthusiasm, strained his own muscularity. But his power was as unflagging as his fraternal energy was persuasive. And in certain quieter moods the poet rose to new heights. The work on which he was engaged at the time of his death is significant; _Launcelot and Guenevere: A Poem in Five Dramas_ is magnificent in its restrained vitality.

Although the varied lyrics in _Songs from Vagabondia_ are the best known examples of Hovey, a more representative collection of his riper work may be found in _Along the Trail_ (1898). This volume contains “Spring” and the stirring “Comrades” in full as well as the best of his vivid fragments.

Hovey died, during his thirty-sixth year, in 1900.

AT THE CROSSROADS

You to the left and I to the right, For the ways of men must sever— And it well may be for a day and a night, And it well may be forever. But whether we meet or whether we part (For our ways are past our knowing), A pledge from the heart to its fellow heart On the ways we all are going! Here’s luck! For we know not where we are going.

Whether we win or whether we lose With the hands that life is dealing, It is not we nor the ways we choose But the fall of the cards that’s sealing. There’s a fate in love and a fate in fight, And the best of us all go under— And whether we’re wrong or whether we’re right, We win, sometimes, to our wonder. Here’s luck! That we may not yet go under!

With a steady swing and an open brow We have tramped the ways together, But we’re clasping hands at the crossroads now In the Fiend’s own night for weather; And whether we bleed or whether we smile In the leagues that lie before us The ways of life are many a mile And the dark of Fate is o’er us. Here’s luck! And a cheer for the dark before us!

You to the left and I to the right, For the ways of men must sever, And it well may be for a day and a night And it well may be forever! But whether we live or whether we die (For the end is past our knowing), Here’s two frank hearts and the open sky, Be a fair or an ill wind blowing! _Here’s luck!_ In the teeth of all winds blowing.

UNMANIFEST DESTINY

To what new fates, my country, far And unforeseen of foe or friend, Beneath what unexpected star Compelled to what unchosen end,

Across the sea that knows no beach, The Admiral of Nations guides Thy blind obedient keels to reach The harbor where thy future rides!

The guns that spoke at Lexington Knew not that God was planning then The trumpet word of Jefferson To bugle forth the rights of men.

To them that wept and cursed Bull Run, What was it but despair and shame? Who saw behind the cloud the sun? Who knew that God was in the flame?

Had not defeat upon defeat, Disaster on disaster come, The slave’s emancipated feet Had never marched behind the drum.

There is a Hand that bends our deeds To mightier issues than we planned; Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds, My country, serves It’s dark command. I do not know beneath what sky Nor on what seas shall be thy fate; I only know it shall be high, I only know it shall be great.

LOVE IN THE WINDS

When I am standing on a mountain crest, Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray, My love of you leaps foaming in my breast, Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray. My heart bounds with the horses of the sea And plunges in the wild ride of the night, Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee That rides out Fate and welcomes gods to fight.

Ho, love, I laugh aloud for love of you, Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather,— No fretful orchid hothoused from the dew, But hale and hardy as the highland heather, Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills, Comrade of ocean, playmate of the hills.

A STEIN SONG

(From “_Spring_”)

Give a rouse, then, in the Maytime For a life that knows no fear! Turn night-time into daytime With the sunlight of good cheer! For it’s always fair weather When good fellows get together, With a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear.

When the wind comes up from Cuba, And the birds are on the wing, And our hearts are patting juba To the banjo of the spring, Then it’s no wonder whether The boys will get together, With a stein on the table and a cheer for everything.

For we’re all frank-and-twenty When the spring is in the air; And we’ve faith and hope a-plenty, And we’ve life and love to spare: And it’s birds of a feather When we all get together, With a stein on the table and a heart without a care.

For we know the world is glorious, And the goal a golden thing, And that God is not censorious When his children have their fling; And life slips its tether When the boys get together, With a stein on the table in the fellowship of spring.

_Madison Cawein_

Madison (Julius) Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1865, and spent most of his life in the state of his birth. He wrote an enormous quantity of verse, publishing more than twenty volumes of pleasant, sometimes exuberant but seldom distinguished poetry. _Lyrics and Idyls_ (1890) and _Vale of Tempe_ (1905) contain his most characteristic stanzas, packed with the lush, adjectival love of Nature that led certain of his admirers to call him (and, one must admit, the alliteration was tempting) “the Keats of Kentucky.”

Cawein’s work divides itself into two distinct veins. In the one, he dealt with the scenes and incidents of his mountain environment: the sag of an old house in the hills, the echoes of a feud, rumblings of the Ku Klux Klan, the ghastly details of a lynching. In his other mood (the one which unfortunately possessed him the greater part of the time) he spent page after page romanticizing Nature, touching up his already painted lilies, polishing his thinly-plated artificialities until the base metal showed through. He pictured all outdoors with painstaking detail. And yet it is somehow unreal, prettified, remote. Every now and then, with an irritating frequency, he tries to transport his audience to a literary Fairyland; but the reader is quickly wearied by the almost interminable procession of fays, gnomes, nixies, elves, dryads, sprites, pucks, fauns—be they ever so lyrical.

In spite of Cawein’s too profuse lyricism, several of his pieces will doubtless remain, though it is not likely that the survivors will be the sugared sweetmeats by which his champions (including William Dean Howells) set such store.

Cawein died in Kentucky in 1914.

SNOW

The moon, like a round device On a shadowy shield of war, Hangs white in a heaven of ice With a solitary star.

The wind has sunk to a sigh, And the waters are stern with frost; And gray, in the eastern sky, The last snow-cloud is lost.

White fields, that are winter-starved, Black woods, that are winter-fraught, Cold, harsh as a face death-carved, With the iron of some black thought.

THE MAN HUNT[16]

The woods stretch wild to the mountain side, And the brush is deep where a man may hide.

They have brought the bloodhounds up again To the roadside rock where they found the slain.

They have brought the bloodhounds up, and they Have taken the trail to the mountain way.

Three times they circled the trail and crossed, And thrice they found it and thrice they lost.

Now straight through the pines and the underbrush They follow the scent through the forest’s hush.

And their deep-mouthed bay is a pulse of fear In the heart of the wood that the man must hear.

The man who crouches among the trees From the stern-faced men that follow these.

A huddle of rocks that the ooze has mossed— And the trail of the hunted again is lost.

An upturned pebble; a bit of ground A heel has trampled—the trail is found.

And the woods re-echo the bloodhounds’ bay As again they take to the mountain way.

A rock; a ribbon of road; a ledge, With a pine-tree clutching its crumbling edge.

A pine, that the lightning long since clave, Whose huge roots hollow a ragged cave.

A shout; a curse; and a face aghast, And the human quarry is laired at last.

The human quarry, with clay-clogged hair And eyes of terror, who waits them there;

That glares and crouches and rising then Hurls clods and curses at dogs and men.

Until the blow of a gun-butt lays Him stunned and bleeding upon his face.

A rope, a prayer, and an oak-tree near. And a score of hands to swing him clear.

A grim black thing for the setting sun And the moon and the stars to look upon.

PENURY

Above his misered embers, gnarled and gray, With toil-twitched limbs he bends; around his hut, Want, like a hobbling hag, goes night and day, Scolding at windows and at doors tight-shut.

DESERTED

The old house leans upon a tree Like some old man upon a staff: The night wind in its ancient porch Sounds like a hollow laugh.

The heaven is wrapped in flying clouds As grandeur cloaks itself in gray: The starlight flitting in and out, Glints like a lanthorn ray.

The dark is full of whispers. Now A fox-hound howls: and through the night, Like some old ghost from out its grave, The moon comes misty white.

_Bert Leston Taylor_

Bert Leston Taylor was born at Goshen, Massachusetts, November 13, 1866, and educated at the College of the City of New York. He had been engaged in journalism since 1895, conducting his column “A Line o’ Type or Two” in the Chicago _Daily Tribune_. He was the author of two novels as well as _A Line-o’-Verse or Two_ (1911) and _Motley Measures_ (1913), a pair of delightful light verse collections.

Taylor died of pneumonia March 19, 1921.

CANOPUS

When quacks with pills political would dope us, When politics absorbs the livelong day, I like to think about that star Canopus, So far, so far away.

Greatest of visioned suns, they say who list ’em; To weigh it, science almost must despair. Its shell would hold our whole dinged solar system, Nor even know ’twas there.

When temporary chairmen utter speeches, And frenzied henchmen howl their battle hymns, My thoughts float out across the cosmic reaches To where Canopus swims.

When men are calling names and making faces, And all the world’s ajangle and ajar, I meditate on interstellar spaces And smoke a mild seegar.

For after one has had about a week of The argument of friends as well as foes, A star that has no parallax to speak of Conduces to repose.

_William Vaughn Moody_

William Vaughn Moody was born at Spencer, Indiana, July 1, 1869, and was educated at Harvard. After graduation, he spent the remaining eighteen years of his life in travel and intensive study—he taught, for eight years, at the University of Chicago—his death coming at the very height of his creative power.

_The Masque of Judgment_, his first work, was published in 1900. A richer and more representative collection appeared the year following; in _Poems_ (1901) Moody effected that mingling of challenging lyricism and spiritual philosophy which becomes more and more insistent. (See Preface.) Throughout his career, and particularly in such lines as the hotly expostulating “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” and the majestic, uncompleted “The Death of Eve,” Moody successfully achieves the rare union of poet and preacher. “Gloucester Moors” is an outcry against the few exploiting the many; “The Quarry” and “An Ode in Time of Hesitation” are passionate with prophecy. His last, extended works have an epic quality which, with their too-crowded details and difficult diction, will effectually prevent them from ever becoming popular. But their importance will grow even as Moody’s place in our literature will eventually be a higher one than that which has yet been accorded him.

His prose play _The Great Divide_ (1907) was strikingly successful when produced by Henry Miller. _The Faith Healer_ (1909), another play in prose, because of its more exalted tone, did not win the favor of the theatre-going public. A complete edition of _The Poems and Poetic Dramas of William Vaughn Moody_ was published in 1912 in two volumes.

In the summer of 1909 Moody was stricken with the illness from which he never recovered. He died in October, 1910.

FROM “JETSAM”

Once at a simple turning of the way I met God walking; and although the dawn Was large behind Him, and the morning stars Circled and sang about his face as birds About the fieldward morning cottager, My coward heart said faintly, “Let us haste! Day grows and it is far to market-town.” Once where I lay in darkness after fight, Sore smitten, thrilled a little thread of song Searching and searching all my muffled sense Until it shook sweet pangs through all my blood, And I beheld one globed in ghostly fire Singing, star-strong, her golden canticle; And her mouth sang, “The hosts of Hate roll past, A dance of dust-motes in the sliding sun; Love’s battle comes on the wide wings of storm, From east to west one legion! Wilt thou strive?”

Then, since the splendor of her sword-bright gaze Was heavy on me with yearning and with scorn, My sick heart muttered, “Yea, the little strife, Yet see, the grievous wounds! I fain would sleep.”

O heart, shalt thou not once be strong to go Where all sweet throats are calling, once be brave To slake with deed thy dumbness? Let us go The path her singing face looms low to point, Pendulous, blanched with longing, shedding flames Of silver on the brown grope of the flood; For all my spirit’s soilure is put by And all my body’s soilure, lacking now But the last lustral sacrament of death To make me clean for those near-searching eyes That question yonder whether all be well, And pause a little ere they dare rejoice.

Question and be thou answered, passionate face! For I am worthy, worthy now at last After so long unworth; strong now at last To give myself to beauty and be saved.

PANDORA’S SONG

(From “_The Fire-Bringer_”)

I stood within the heart of God; It seemed a place I had known: (I was blood-sister to the clod, Blood-brother to the stone.)

I found my love and labor there, My house, my raiment, meat and wine, My ancient rage, my old despair,— Yea, all things that were mine.