X

XGEORGE E. WOODBERRY“For he who standeth in the whole world’s hopeIs as a magnet; he shall draw all heartsTo be his shield, all arms to strike his blow.”THESE words by Mr. George E. Woodberry sound the keynote to his art, for he has set himself to disclose the immanence of beauty, of strength; to mould the real to the ideal; and whether he fashions a god, as in “Agathon,” or a patriot, as in “My Country,” he is concerned only with the development of the spiritual potentialities.He comes to life, to poetry, enriched by a scholar’s culture, but limited by his enrichment on the creative side of his art. He is too well possessed of the immortal melodies to trust the spontaneous notes of his own voice, and hence his verse on its technical side lacks variety and freedom of movement. It has all the cultivated, classical freedom, it flows ever in pure and true numbers; but the masters sing in its overtones, and one catches himself hearkening to them as to Mr. Woodberry himself.In other words, those innovations of form which strongly creative thoughts usually bring with them, are not to be found in Mr. Woodberry’s work. He has a highly developed sense of rhythm and tone, and very rarely is any metrical canon violated; but the strange new music, the wild free note, that showers down as if from upper air, and sets one’s heart a-tingling, is seldom voiced through him. The bird is caged; and while its song is true and beautiful, one comes soon to know its notes and the range of its melody.Mr. Woodberry has, however, something to say; and if he says it rather with grace and cultivation as to form, than with any startling surprises of artistic effect, his work in its essence, in its spirit, is none the less creative, and upon this side its strength lies. It is ethical and intellectual, rather than emotional, poetry. Though rising often to an impassioned height, it is a passion of the brain, pure and cold as a flood of moonlight. Even the songs of “Wild Eden,” and others dealing with love, remain an abstraction; one does not get the sense of personality, except in one or two of them, such as the lyric, “O, Inexpressible As Sweet,” and in these few lines called “Divine Awe”:To tremble when I touch her hands,With awe that no man understands;To feel soft reverence ariseWhen, lover-sweet, I meet her eyes;To see her beauty grow and shineWhen most I feel this awe divine,—Whate’er befall me, this is mine;And where about the room she moves,My spirit follows her, and loves.But although one misses the sense of reality in the songs of love, the ideality is for that reason the more apparent. Love that has sublimated, taken on the rarer part, that has made a mystic interchange with nature and with God, is celebrated in the fervid poem, “He Ate The Laurel And Is Mad,” which marks one of the strongest achievements in Mr. Woodberry’s work, and especially in a lyric it contains, vibrating with a fine, compulsive melody. The lines preceding the lyric relate the coming of Love into the heart of nature:And instant back his longing runsThrough bud and billow, through drift and blaze,Through thought, through prayer, the thousand waysThe spirit journeys from despair;He sees all things that they are fair,But feels them as the daisied sod,—This slumbrous beauty, this light, this room,The chrysalis and broken tombHe cleaveth on his way to God.Illustration of George WoodberryThen the poem breaks into this pæan, whose music outsings its thought when pushed to analysis; this is one of Mr. Woodberry’s metrical exceptions that prove the rule. Here is sheer music making fine but not extraordinary thought seem great, whereas in the majority of his work it is the thought to which one listens rather than the melody; but to the lyric,I shall go singing over-seas;“The million years of the planets increase;All pangs of death, all cries of birth,Are clasped at one by the heart of the earth.”I shall go singing by tower and town:“The thousand cities of men that crownEmpire slow-rising from horde and clan,Are clasped at one by the heart of man.”I shall go singing by flower and brier:“The multitudinous stars of fire,And man made infinite under the sod,Are clasped at one by the heart of God.”I shall go singing by ice and snow:“Blow soon, dread angel, greatly blow,Break up, ye gulfs, beneath, above,Peal, time’s last music,—‘love, love, love!’”Of his recent volume in which he gathers his most representative work, “The North Shore Watch,” a threnody published some years ago,remains one of the truest poems in sincerity and sympathy of expression,—not only an idyl of remembered comradeship, but of the sea in its many moods; and here one may note that of Mr. Woodberry’s references to nature, those of the sea are incomparably the finest, and exhale an invigorating savor of the brine. They are scattered through “The North Shore Watch,” but because of the stately sadness of the verse are less representative of his characteristic note than are these buoyant lines which open the poem “Seaward”:I will go down in my youth to the hoar sea’s infinite foam;I will bathe in the winds of heaven; I will nest where the white birds home;Where the sheeted emerald glitters and drifts with bursts of snow,In the spume of stormy mornings, I will make me ready and go;Where under the clear west weather the violet surge is rolled,I will strike with the sun in heaven the day-long league of gold;Will mix with the waves, and mingle with the bloom of the sunset bar,And toss with the tangle of moonbeams, and call to the morning star;And wave and wing shall know me a seachild even as they,Of the race of the great seafarers, a thousand years if a day.These lines have the bracing ozone of the east wind; it is good to fill one’s lungs with their freshening breath. In another sea-song, “Homeward Bound,” an exultant, grateful hymn, Mr. Woodberry speaks of steering“Through the weird, red-billowing sunset”and of falling asleep in the “rocking dark,” and with the dawn,Whether the purple furrow heaps the bows with dazzling spray,Or buried in green-based masses they dip the storm-swept day,Or the white fog ribbons o’er them, the strong ship holds her wayThese are pictures in strong color, freehand records with pigment, of which Mr. Woodberry’s sea-verse contains many duplicates. He paints the sea as an impressionist, catching her evanescent moods. Aside from the pictorial art of the poem from which the lines above are taken, it thrills with the gladness that abides with one comingHome from the lonely cities, time’s wreck, and the naked woe,Home through the clean great waters where freemen’s pennants blow,Home to the land men dream of, where all the nations go.Mr. Woodberry is an American, and ever an American, whatever tribute he may pay at longer dedicated shrines. His ode to “My Country” is an impassioned utterance, full of ideality, and pride in things as they are, not lacking, however, in the prophetic vision of what they shall be. He trusts his country without reservation, recognizes her greater commission in what has terrified many poets,—the absorption of the Eastern isles,—and bids her be swift to yield her benefits:O, whisper to thy clustered islesIf any rosy promise round them smiles;O, call to every seaward promontoryIf one of them, perchance, is made the cape of glory.In technique the ode has a fine sweep and movement; it thrills with flights of feeling, as in these lines near the close,—And never greater love salutes thy browThan his, who seeks thee now.Alien the sea and salt the foamWhere’er it bears him from his home;And when he leaps to land,A lover treads the strand.The ode is somewhat marred by prolixity, and now and again by the declamatory impulse getting the better of the creative; but grantingthis it remains a fine rhapsody, redeeming the time to those who think the days are evil, and more than ever proving Mr. Woodberry the idealist, if not, indeed, the prophet. In the Emerson Ode, read at the centenary in Boston, there is poem-for-occasion utterance until one reaches the fourth division, where the rhetoric gives way to the pensive note,I lay the singing laurels downUpon the silent grave,and grows from this into a glimpsing of Emerson’s most characteristic thought, to which Mr. Woodberry sings his own indebtedness. This philosophical résumé has value as critical interpretation and as tribute to whom tribute is due, but it lacks the vital spark as poetry. Odes of this sort are no gauge of a poet’s merit, and although Mr. Woodberry does not reveal his weakness in writing of this sort, neither does he to any marked degree reveal his strength. It is work of conventional creditability, reaching occasionally some flight of pure poetry, but pervaded in general by the perfunctory note that results from coercing the muse; and here one may interpolate the wish that all poems-for-occasion might be “put upon the list,” for it is certain, not only thatthe majority of them “never would be missed,” but that poetry would rebound from a most inert weight if lightened of them; nor is this in any sense personal to Mr. Woodberry, whose “Emerson Ode” is a far stronger piece of work than are most compositions of a similar nature. In the “Player’s Elegy,” in the ode written for the dedication of Alumni Hall at Phillips Exeter Academy, and in the several poems addressed to his fellow-professors at Columbia, there are also passages of spontaneous force and beauty, and the high motive of all must not be lost sight of, but, taken as a whole, this group of poems could scarcely figure in an appraisal of the individuality of his work.It is on the spiritually philosophical side of his nature that Mr. Woodberry makes his strongest appeal. He is not primarily a poet of love, nor of nature, nor a melodist making music for its own sake; he is an eager, questing follower of the ideal; proclaimer of the truth thatThe glamour of God hath a thousand shapesAnd every one divine.When he interprets the mystery of love, or turns to the world without, it is the immanence of the divine that haunts him:Over the grey leagues of oceanThe infinite yearneth alone;The forests with wandering emotionThe thing they know not intone.He is, indeed, the spirit’s votary, and the ultimate purport of his message is the recognition of one’s own spirit force. His poem, “Nay, Soul,” rebukes the weakness that looks on every side for that which is within; the nature that, seeking props, falls by the way; or, craving understanding, loses the strength that comes of being misunderstood. It subtly divides the legitimate gifts of sympathy from those which weakness demands, and reveals the impossibility of coercing life, or love, or any good to which one’s nature is not so magnetized that it comes to him unentreated. These are potent lines:—Nay, Soul, thy shame forbear!Between the earth and skyWas never man could buyThe bread of life with prayer,Not though his brother thereSaw him with hunger die.His life a man may give,But, not for deepest ruth,Beauty, nor love, nor truthWhereby himself doth live.Come home, poor fugitive!Art thou so poor, forsooth?· · · · ·Thy heart—look thou aright!Fear not the wild untrod,Nor birth, nor burial sod!Look, and in native light,Bare as to Christ’s own sight,Living shalt thou see God.The dramatic poem, “Agathon,” which is builded upon the philosophy of Plato, is perhaps the most thoughtful and thought-inciting work in the newly collected volume. It is in no sense of the word dramatic, but doubtless cast in this form from its wider adaptability to the contrasts of thought. The poem is too lengthy to follow an analysis of its philosophy, which is wrought out with subtle elaboration, smacking too much at times of a logical demonstration, but in the main leavened with imaginative phrase. Its poetic climax is in the apostrophe which follows the statement thatThe sweetest roamer is a boy’s young heart.The lines form a blank-verse lyric with a rich cadence and movement:O youngest Roamer, Hesper shuts the day,White Hesper folded in the rose of eve;The still cloud floats, and kissed by twilight sleeps;The mists drop down, and near the mountain moor;And mute the bird’s throat swells with slumber now;And now the wild winds to their eyries cling.· · · · ·O youngest Roamer, wonderful is joy,The rose in bloom that out of darkness springs;The lily folded to the wave of life,The lotus on the stream’s dark passion borne.· · · · ·Ah, fortunate he roams who roameth here,Who finds the happy covert and lies down,And hears the laughter gurgling in the fount,And feels the dreamy light imbathe his limbs.No more he roams, he roams no more, no more.These lines are reminiscent of Tennyson’s “Princess” in their metrical note, particularly in the final couplet of the first stanza, with the “dying fall” of the cadence, bringing to mind:Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.Mr. Woodberry’s poetic affiliation with Tennyson comes out unmistakably in various other poems, leaving no doubt as to one of the masters who sing in his over-tones. Here, for illustration, is a transfusion with Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears.” One stanza of the flawless lyric reads:Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawnsThe earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birdsTo dying ears, when unto dying eyesThe casement slowly grows a glimmering square;So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.And Mr. Woodberry says:O hidden-strange as on dew-heavy lawnsThe warm dark scent of summer-fragrant dawns;O tender as the faint sea-changes are,When grows the flush and pales the snow-white star;So strange, so tender, to a maid is love.The mere fact of employing the Tennyson metre, especially when rhymed, would not give the sense of over-assimilation of the other’s work were it not for the marked correspondence in the diction and atmosphere, the first line of Tennyson’s lyric being expanded into the opening couplet of Mr. Woodberry’s stanza, and the final lines of each having so similar a terminology. Shelley is a much more operative force in Mr. Woodberry’s poetry than Tennyson, but rather in temperamental kinship than in a technical way. Mr. Woodberry could scarcely fail to have a keen sympathy with the passionate art of Shelley, who lived in the ideal, subtilized and sublimated beyond all reach but that of longing, but who yet set his hand and brain to the strife about him. In his earlier work Mr. Woodberry occasionally shows the Shelley influence in technique and theme, but not in his later verse. One can scarcely understand his leaving in a definitive collection of his work the poem “Love at the Door,” whose obligations to Taylor’s “BedouinLove Song” and Shelley’s “I arise from dreams of thee,” are about equally distributed. Most poets have their early experiments in the reshaping of forms and themes, but they should be edited out of representative collections. The poem is scarcely a creditable assimilation of the models in question, and does scant justice to Mr. Woodberry’s later poetry, making the query more inevitable why he should have left it in the volume, which is in the main so finished and ripe a work. Occasionally one comes upon poems, or passages, which a keener self-criticism would have eliminated, as the line from “Taormina,” declaring thatFront more majestic of sea-mountains nowhere is there uplifted the whole earth through,—whose legitimate place is in a rhetorical textbook, as an exercise in redundance. Mr. Woodberry is occasionally allured by his theme until the song outruns the motive, but he rarely pads a line like this; even poetic hyperbole has a limit.In picturesque imagery his work is finely individualized; witness the figurative beauty of the following lines:The ocean, storming on the rocks,Shepherds not there his wild, wet flocks.The soaring ether nowhere findsAn eyrie for the wingéd winds;Nor has yon glittering sky a charmTo hive in heaven the starry swarm;And so thy wandering thoughts, my heart,No home shall find; let them depart.The two sonnets “At Gibraltar” represent, perhaps, as fine an achievement as distinguishes Mr. Woodberry’s work. It would, indeed, be difficult to surpass them in American literature of to-day in strength, passion, or ideality:IEngland, I stand on thy imperial ground,Not all a stranger; as thy bugles blow,I feel within my blood old battles flow—The blood whose ancient founts in thee are found.Still surging dark against the Christian boundWide Islam presses; well its peoples knowThy heights that watch them wandering below;I think how Lucknow heard their gathering sound.I turn, and meet the cruel, turbaned face.England, ’tis sweet to be so much thy son!I feel the conqueror in my blood and race;Last night Trafalgar awed me, and to-dayGibraltar wakened; hark, thy evening gunStartles the desert over Africa!IIThou art the rock of empire, set mid-seasBetween the East and West, that God has built;Advance thy Roman borders where thou wilt,While run thy armies true with His decrees.Law, justice, liberty—great gifts are these;Watch that they spread where English blood is spilt,Lest, mixed and sullied with his country’s guilt,The soldier’s life-stream flow, and Heaven displease!Two swords there are: one naked, apt to smite,Thy blade of war; and, battle-storied, oneRejoices in the sheath, and hides from light.American I am; would wars were done!Now westward, look, my country bids good-night—Peace to the world from ports without a gun!Whether in his travels or in the quiet of his own contemplation, the emphasis of Mr. Woodberry’s thought is upon the noble, the essential, the beautiful. Although not a strongly creative poet in form, he is a highly cultivated poet, and hands on the nobler traditions of art; and if now and then he wraps another’s “singing robe” about him, it is but an external vesture, leaving the soul of his thought unchanged.

“For he who standeth in the whole world’s hopeIs as a magnet; he shall draw all heartsTo be his shield, all arms to strike his blow.”

“For he who standeth in the whole world’s hope

Is as a magnet; he shall draw all hearts

To be his shield, all arms to strike his blow.”

THESE words by Mr. George E. Woodberry sound the keynote to his art, for he has set himself to disclose the immanence of beauty, of strength; to mould the real to the ideal; and whether he fashions a god, as in “Agathon,” or a patriot, as in “My Country,” he is concerned only with the development of the spiritual potentialities.

He comes to life, to poetry, enriched by a scholar’s culture, but limited by his enrichment on the creative side of his art. He is too well possessed of the immortal melodies to trust the spontaneous notes of his own voice, and hence his verse on its technical side lacks variety and freedom of movement. It has all the cultivated, classical freedom, it flows ever in pure and true numbers; but the masters sing in its overtones, and one catches himself hearkening to them as to Mr. Woodberry himself.In other words, those innovations of form which strongly creative thoughts usually bring with them, are not to be found in Mr. Woodberry’s work. He has a highly developed sense of rhythm and tone, and very rarely is any metrical canon violated; but the strange new music, the wild free note, that showers down as if from upper air, and sets one’s heart a-tingling, is seldom voiced through him. The bird is caged; and while its song is true and beautiful, one comes soon to know its notes and the range of its melody.

Mr. Woodberry has, however, something to say; and if he says it rather with grace and cultivation as to form, than with any startling surprises of artistic effect, his work in its essence, in its spirit, is none the less creative, and upon this side its strength lies. It is ethical and intellectual, rather than emotional, poetry. Though rising often to an impassioned height, it is a passion of the brain, pure and cold as a flood of moonlight. Even the songs of “Wild Eden,” and others dealing with love, remain an abstraction; one does not get the sense of personality, except in one or two of them, such as the lyric, “O, Inexpressible As Sweet,” and in these few lines called “Divine Awe”:

To tremble when I touch her hands,With awe that no man understands;To feel soft reverence ariseWhen, lover-sweet, I meet her eyes;To see her beauty grow and shineWhen most I feel this awe divine,—Whate’er befall me, this is mine;And where about the room she moves,My spirit follows her, and loves.

To tremble when I touch her hands,

With awe that no man understands;

To feel soft reverence arise

When, lover-sweet, I meet her eyes;

To see her beauty grow and shine

When most I feel this awe divine,—

Whate’er befall me, this is mine;

And where about the room she moves,

My spirit follows her, and loves.

But although one misses the sense of reality in the songs of love, the ideality is for that reason the more apparent. Love that has sublimated, taken on the rarer part, that has made a mystic interchange with nature and with God, is celebrated in the fervid poem, “He Ate The Laurel And Is Mad,” which marks one of the strongest achievements in Mr. Woodberry’s work, and especially in a lyric it contains, vibrating with a fine, compulsive melody. The lines preceding the lyric relate the coming of Love into the heart of nature:

And instant back his longing runsThrough bud and billow, through drift and blaze,Through thought, through prayer, the thousand waysThe spirit journeys from despair;He sees all things that they are fair,But feels them as the daisied sod,—This slumbrous beauty, this light, this room,The chrysalis and broken tombHe cleaveth on his way to God.

And instant back his longing runs

Through bud and billow, through drift and blaze,

Through thought, through prayer, the thousand ways

The spirit journeys from despair;

He sees all things that they are fair,

But feels them as the daisied sod,—

This slumbrous beauty, this light, this room,

The chrysalis and broken tomb

He cleaveth on his way to God.

Illustration of George Woodberry

Then the poem breaks into this pæan, whose music outsings its thought when pushed to analysis; this is one of Mr. Woodberry’s metrical exceptions that prove the rule. Here is sheer music making fine but not extraordinary thought seem great, whereas in the majority of his work it is the thought to which one listens rather than the melody; but to the lyric,

I shall go singing over-seas;“The million years of the planets increase;All pangs of death, all cries of birth,Are clasped at one by the heart of the earth.”I shall go singing by tower and town:“The thousand cities of men that crownEmpire slow-rising from horde and clan,Are clasped at one by the heart of man.”I shall go singing by flower and brier:“The multitudinous stars of fire,And man made infinite under the sod,Are clasped at one by the heart of God.”I shall go singing by ice and snow:“Blow soon, dread angel, greatly blow,Break up, ye gulfs, beneath, above,Peal, time’s last music,—‘love, love, love!’”

I shall go singing over-seas;“The million years of the planets increase;All pangs of death, all cries of birth,Are clasped at one by the heart of the earth.”

I shall go singing over-seas;

“The million years of the planets increase;

All pangs of death, all cries of birth,

Are clasped at one by the heart of the earth.”

I shall go singing by tower and town:“The thousand cities of men that crownEmpire slow-rising from horde and clan,Are clasped at one by the heart of man.”

I shall go singing by tower and town:

“The thousand cities of men that crown

Empire slow-rising from horde and clan,

Are clasped at one by the heart of man.”

I shall go singing by flower and brier:“The multitudinous stars of fire,And man made infinite under the sod,Are clasped at one by the heart of God.”

I shall go singing by flower and brier:

“The multitudinous stars of fire,

And man made infinite under the sod,

Are clasped at one by the heart of God.”

I shall go singing by ice and snow:“Blow soon, dread angel, greatly blow,Break up, ye gulfs, beneath, above,Peal, time’s last music,—‘love, love, love!’”

I shall go singing by ice and snow:

“Blow soon, dread angel, greatly blow,

Break up, ye gulfs, beneath, above,

Peal, time’s last music,—‘love, love, love!’”

Of his recent volume in which he gathers his most representative work, “The North Shore Watch,” a threnody published some years ago,remains one of the truest poems in sincerity and sympathy of expression,—not only an idyl of remembered comradeship, but of the sea in its many moods; and here one may note that of Mr. Woodberry’s references to nature, those of the sea are incomparably the finest, and exhale an invigorating savor of the brine. They are scattered through “The North Shore Watch,” but because of the stately sadness of the verse are less representative of his characteristic note than are these buoyant lines which open the poem “Seaward”:

I will go down in my youth to the hoar sea’s infinite foam;I will bathe in the winds of heaven; I will nest where the white birds home;Where the sheeted emerald glitters and drifts with bursts of snow,In the spume of stormy mornings, I will make me ready and go;Where under the clear west weather the violet surge is rolled,I will strike with the sun in heaven the day-long league of gold;Will mix with the waves, and mingle with the bloom of the sunset bar,And toss with the tangle of moonbeams, and call to the morning star;And wave and wing shall know me a seachild even as they,Of the race of the great seafarers, a thousand years if a day.

I will go down in my youth to the hoar sea’s infinite foam;

I will bathe in the winds of heaven; I will nest where the white birds home;

Where the sheeted emerald glitters and drifts with bursts of snow,

In the spume of stormy mornings, I will make me ready and go;

Where under the clear west weather the violet surge is rolled,

I will strike with the sun in heaven the day-long league of gold;

Will mix with the waves, and mingle with the bloom of the sunset bar,

And toss with the tangle of moonbeams, and call to the morning star;

And wave and wing shall know me a seachild even as they,

Of the race of the great seafarers, a thousand years if a day.

These lines have the bracing ozone of the east wind; it is good to fill one’s lungs with their freshening breath. In another sea-song, “Homeward Bound,” an exultant, grateful hymn, Mr. Woodberry speaks of steering

“Through the weird, red-billowing sunset”

and of falling asleep in the “rocking dark,” and with the dawn,

Whether the purple furrow heaps the bows with dazzling spray,Or buried in green-based masses they dip the storm-swept day,Or the white fog ribbons o’er them, the strong ship holds her way

Whether the purple furrow heaps the bows with dazzling spray,

Or buried in green-based masses they dip the storm-swept day,

Or the white fog ribbons o’er them, the strong ship holds her way

These are pictures in strong color, freehand records with pigment, of which Mr. Woodberry’s sea-verse contains many duplicates. He paints the sea as an impressionist, catching her evanescent moods. Aside from the pictorial art of the poem from which the lines above are taken, it thrills with the gladness that abides with one coming

Home from the lonely cities, time’s wreck, and the naked woe,Home through the clean great waters where freemen’s pennants blow,Home to the land men dream of, where all the nations go.

Home from the lonely cities, time’s wreck, and the naked woe,

Home through the clean great waters where freemen’s pennants blow,

Home to the land men dream of, where all the nations go.

Mr. Woodberry is an American, and ever an American, whatever tribute he may pay at longer dedicated shrines. His ode to “My Country” is an impassioned utterance, full of ideality, and pride in things as they are, not lacking, however, in the prophetic vision of what they shall be. He trusts his country without reservation, recognizes her greater commission in what has terrified many poets,—the absorption of the Eastern isles,—and bids her be swift to yield her benefits:

O, whisper to thy clustered islesIf any rosy promise round them smiles;O, call to every seaward promontoryIf one of them, perchance, is made the cape of glory.

O, whisper to thy clustered isles

If any rosy promise round them smiles;

O, call to every seaward promontory

If one of them, perchance, is made the cape of glory.

In technique the ode has a fine sweep and movement; it thrills with flights of feeling, as in these lines near the close,—

And never greater love salutes thy browThan his, who seeks thee now.Alien the sea and salt the foamWhere’er it bears him from his home;And when he leaps to land,A lover treads the strand.

And never greater love salutes thy brow

Than his, who seeks thee now.

Alien the sea and salt the foam

Where’er it bears him from his home;

And when he leaps to land,

A lover treads the strand.

The ode is somewhat marred by prolixity, and now and again by the declamatory impulse getting the better of the creative; but grantingthis it remains a fine rhapsody, redeeming the time to those who think the days are evil, and more than ever proving Mr. Woodberry the idealist, if not, indeed, the prophet. In the Emerson Ode, read at the centenary in Boston, there is poem-for-occasion utterance until one reaches the fourth division, where the rhetoric gives way to the pensive note,

I lay the singing laurels downUpon the silent grave,

I lay the singing laurels down

Upon the silent grave,

and grows from this into a glimpsing of Emerson’s most characteristic thought, to which Mr. Woodberry sings his own indebtedness. This philosophical résumé has value as critical interpretation and as tribute to whom tribute is due, but it lacks the vital spark as poetry. Odes of this sort are no gauge of a poet’s merit, and although Mr. Woodberry does not reveal his weakness in writing of this sort, neither does he to any marked degree reveal his strength. It is work of conventional creditability, reaching occasionally some flight of pure poetry, but pervaded in general by the perfunctory note that results from coercing the muse; and here one may interpolate the wish that all poems-for-occasion might be “put upon the list,” for it is certain, not only thatthe majority of them “never would be missed,” but that poetry would rebound from a most inert weight if lightened of them; nor is this in any sense personal to Mr. Woodberry, whose “Emerson Ode” is a far stronger piece of work than are most compositions of a similar nature. In the “Player’s Elegy,” in the ode written for the dedication of Alumni Hall at Phillips Exeter Academy, and in the several poems addressed to his fellow-professors at Columbia, there are also passages of spontaneous force and beauty, and the high motive of all must not be lost sight of, but, taken as a whole, this group of poems could scarcely figure in an appraisal of the individuality of his work.

It is on the spiritually philosophical side of his nature that Mr. Woodberry makes his strongest appeal. He is not primarily a poet of love, nor of nature, nor a melodist making music for its own sake; he is an eager, questing follower of the ideal; proclaimer of the truth that

The glamour of God hath a thousand shapesAnd every one divine.

The glamour of God hath a thousand shapes

And every one divine.

When he interprets the mystery of love, or turns to the world without, it is the immanence of the divine that haunts him:

Over the grey leagues of oceanThe infinite yearneth alone;The forests with wandering emotionThe thing they know not intone.

Over the grey leagues of ocean

The infinite yearneth alone;

The forests with wandering emotion

The thing they know not intone.

He is, indeed, the spirit’s votary, and the ultimate purport of his message is the recognition of one’s own spirit force. His poem, “Nay, Soul,” rebukes the weakness that looks on every side for that which is within; the nature that, seeking props, falls by the way; or, craving understanding, loses the strength that comes of being misunderstood. It subtly divides the legitimate gifts of sympathy from those which weakness demands, and reveals the impossibility of coercing life, or love, or any good to which one’s nature is not so magnetized that it comes to him unentreated. These are potent lines:—

Nay, Soul, thy shame forbear!Between the earth and skyWas never man could buyThe bread of life with prayer,Not though his brother thereSaw him with hunger die.His life a man may give,But, not for deepest ruth,Beauty, nor love, nor truthWhereby himself doth live.Come home, poor fugitive!Art thou so poor, forsooth?· · · · ·Thy heart—look thou aright!Fear not the wild untrod,Nor birth, nor burial sod!Look, and in native light,Bare as to Christ’s own sight,Living shalt thou see God.

Nay, Soul, thy shame forbear!Between the earth and skyWas never man could buyThe bread of life with prayer,Not though his brother thereSaw him with hunger die.

Nay, Soul, thy shame forbear!

Between the earth and sky

Was never man could buy

The bread of life with prayer,

Not though his brother there

Saw him with hunger die.

His life a man may give,But, not for deepest ruth,Beauty, nor love, nor truthWhereby himself doth live.Come home, poor fugitive!Art thou so poor, forsooth?· · · · ·Thy heart—look thou aright!Fear not the wild untrod,Nor birth, nor burial sod!Look, and in native light,Bare as to Christ’s own sight,Living shalt thou see God.

His life a man may give,

But, not for deepest ruth,

Beauty, nor love, nor truth

Whereby himself doth live.

Come home, poor fugitive!

Art thou so poor, forsooth?

· · · · ·

Thy heart—look thou aright!

Fear not the wild untrod,

Nor birth, nor burial sod!

Look, and in native light,

Bare as to Christ’s own sight,

Living shalt thou see God.

The dramatic poem, “Agathon,” which is builded upon the philosophy of Plato, is perhaps the most thoughtful and thought-inciting work in the newly collected volume. It is in no sense of the word dramatic, but doubtless cast in this form from its wider adaptability to the contrasts of thought. The poem is too lengthy to follow an analysis of its philosophy, which is wrought out with subtle elaboration, smacking too much at times of a logical demonstration, but in the main leavened with imaginative phrase. Its poetic climax is in the apostrophe which follows the statement that

The sweetest roamer is a boy’s young heart.

The lines form a blank-verse lyric with a rich cadence and movement:

O youngest Roamer, Hesper shuts the day,White Hesper folded in the rose of eve;The still cloud floats, and kissed by twilight sleeps;The mists drop down, and near the mountain moor;And mute the bird’s throat swells with slumber now;And now the wild winds to their eyries cling.· · · · ·O youngest Roamer, wonderful is joy,The rose in bloom that out of darkness springs;The lily folded to the wave of life,The lotus on the stream’s dark passion borne.· · · · ·Ah, fortunate he roams who roameth here,Who finds the happy covert and lies down,And hears the laughter gurgling in the fount,And feels the dreamy light imbathe his limbs.No more he roams, he roams no more, no more.

O youngest Roamer, Hesper shuts the day,

White Hesper folded in the rose of eve;

The still cloud floats, and kissed by twilight sleeps;

The mists drop down, and near the mountain moor;

And mute the bird’s throat swells with slumber now;

And now the wild winds to their eyries cling.

· · · · ·

O youngest Roamer, wonderful is joy,

The rose in bloom that out of darkness springs;

The lily folded to the wave of life,

The lotus on the stream’s dark passion borne.

· · · · ·

Ah, fortunate he roams who roameth here,

Who finds the happy covert and lies down,

And hears the laughter gurgling in the fount,

And feels the dreamy light imbathe his limbs.

No more he roams, he roams no more, no more.

These lines are reminiscent of Tennyson’s “Princess” in their metrical note, particularly in the final couplet of the first stanza, with the “dying fall” of the cadence, bringing to mind:

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,

And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Mr. Woodberry’s poetic affiliation with Tennyson comes out unmistakably in various other poems, leaving no doubt as to one of the masters who sing in his over-tones. Here, for illustration, is a transfusion with Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears.” One stanza of the flawless lyric reads:

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawnsThe earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birdsTo dying ears, when unto dying eyesThe casement slowly grows a glimmering square;So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

And Mr. Woodberry says:

O hidden-strange as on dew-heavy lawnsThe warm dark scent of summer-fragrant dawns;O tender as the faint sea-changes are,When grows the flush and pales the snow-white star;So strange, so tender, to a maid is love.

O hidden-strange as on dew-heavy lawns

The warm dark scent of summer-fragrant dawns;

O tender as the faint sea-changes are,

When grows the flush and pales the snow-white star;

So strange, so tender, to a maid is love.

The mere fact of employing the Tennyson metre, especially when rhymed, would not give the sense of over-assimilation of the other’s work were it not for the marked correspondence in the diction and atmosphere, the first line of Tennyson’s lyric being expanded into the opening couplet of Mr. Woodberry’s stanza, and the final lines of each having so similar a terminology. Shelley is a much more operative force in Mr. Woodberry’s poetry than Tennyson, but rather in temperamental kinship than in a technical way. Mr. Woodberry could scarcely fail to have a keen sympathy with the passionate art of Shelley, who lived in the ideal, subtilized and sublimated beyond all reach but that of longing, but who yet set his hand and brain to the strife about him. In his earlier work Mr. Woodberry occasionally shows the Shelley influence in technique and theme, but not in his later verse. One can scarcely understand his leaving in a definitive collection of his work the poem “Love at the Door,” whose obligations to Taylor’s “BedouinLove Song” and Shelley’s “I arise from dreams of thee,” are about equally distributed. Most poets have their early experiments in the reshaping of forms and themes, but they should be edited out of representative collections. The poem is scarcely a creditable assimilation of the models in question, and does scant justice to Mr. Woodberry’s later poetry, making the query more inevitable why he should have left it in the volume, which is in the main so finished and ripe a work. Occasionally one comes upon poems, or passages, which a keener self-criticism would have eliminated, as the line from “Taormina,” declaring that

Front more majestic of sea-mountains nowhere is there uplifted the whole earth through,—

whose legitimate place is in a rhetorical textbook, as an exercise in redundance. Mr. Woodberry is occasionally allured by his theme until the song outruns the motive, but he rarely pads a line like this; even poetic hyperbole has a limit.

In picturesque imagery his work is finely individualized; witness the figurative beauty of the following lines:

The ocean, storming on the rocks,Shepherds not there his wild, wet flocks.The soaring ether nowhere findsAn eyrie for the wingéd winds;Nor has yon glittering sky a charmTo hive in heaven the starry swarm;And so thy wandering thoughts, my heart,No home shall find; let them depart.

The ocean, storming on the rocks,

Shepherds not there his wild, wet flocks.

The soaring ether nowhere finds

An eyrie for the wingéd winds;

Nor has yon glittering sky a charm

To hive in heaven the starry swarm;

And so thy wandering thoughts, my heart,

No home shall find; let them depart.

The two sonnets “At Gibraltar” represent, perhaps, as fine an achievement as distinguishes Mr. Woodberry’s work. It would, indeed, be difficult to surpass them in American literature of to-day in strength, passion, or ideality:

IEngland, I stand on thy imperial ground,Not all a stranger; as thy bugles blow,I feel within my blood old battles flow—The blood whose ancient founts in thee are found.Still surging dark against the Christian boundWide Islam presses; well its peoples knowThy heights that watch them wandering below;I think how Lucknow heard their gathering sound.I turn, and meet the cruel, turbaned face.England, ’tis sweet to be so much thy son!I feel the conqueror in my blood and race;Last night Trafalgar awed me, and to-dayGibraltar wakened; hark, thy evening gunStartles the desert over Africa!IIThou art the rock of empire, set mid-seasBetween the East and West, that God has built;Advance thy Roman borders where thou wilt,While run thy armies true with His decrees.Law, justice, liberty—great gifts are these;Watch that they spread where English blood is spilt,Lest, mixed and sullied with his country’s guilt,The soldier’s life-stream flow, and Heaven displease!Two swords there are: one naked, apt to smite,Thy blade of war; and, battle-storied, oneRejoices in the sheath, and hides from light.American I am; would wars were done!Now westward, look, my country bids good-night—Peace to the world from ports without a gun!

England, I stand on thy imperial ground,Not all a stranger; as thy bugles blow,I feel within my blood old battles flow—The blood whose ancient founts in thee are found.Still surging dark against the Christian boundWide Islam presses; well its peoples knowThy heights that watch them wandering below;I think how Lucknow heard their gathering sound.I turn, and meet the cruel, turbaned face.England, ’tis sweet to be so much thy son!I feel the conqueror in my blood and race;Last night Trafalgar awed me, and to-dayGibraltar wakened; hark, thy evening gunStartles the desert over Africa!

England, I stand on thy imperial ground,

Not all a stranger; as thy bugles blow,

I feel within my blood old battles flow—

The blood whose ancient founts in thee are found.

Still surging dark against the Christian bound

Wide Islam presses; well its peoples know

Thy heights that watch them wandering below;

I think how Lucknow heard their gathering sound.

I turn, and meet the cruel, turbaned face.

England, ’tis sweet to be so much thy son!

I feel the conqueror in my blood and race;

Last night Trafalgar awed me, and to-day

Gibraltar wakened; hark, thy evening gun

Startles the desert over Africa!

Thou art the rock of empire, set mid-seasBetween the East and West, that God has built;Advance thy Roman borders where thou wilt,While run thy armies true with His decrees.Law, justice, liberty—great gifts are these;Watch that they spread where English blood is spilt,Lest, mixed and sullied with his country’s guilt,The soldier’s life-stream flow, and Heaven displease!Two swords there are: one naked, apt to smite,Thy blade of war; and, battle-storied, oneRejoices in the sheath, and hides from light.American I am; would wars were done!Now westward, look, my country bids good-night—Peace to the world from ports without a gun!

Thou art the rock of empire, set mid-seas

Between the East and West, that God has built;

Advance thy Roman borders where thou wilt,

While run thy armies true with His decrees.

Law, justice, liberty—great gifts are these;

Watch that they spread where English blood is spilt,

Lest, mixed and sullied with his country’s guilt,

The soldier’s life-stream flow, and Heaven displease!

Two swords there are: one naked, apt to smite,

Thy blade of war; and, battle-storied, one

Rejoices in the sheath, and hides from light.

American I am; would wars were done!

Now westward, look, my country bids good-night—

Peace to the world from ports without a gun!

Whether in his travels or in the quiet of his own contemplation, the emphasis of Mr. Woodberry’s thought is upon the noble, the essential, the beautiful. Although not a strongly creative poet in form, he is a highly cultivated poet, and hands on the nobler traditions of art; and if now and then he wraps another’s “singing robe” about him, it is but an external vesture, leaving the soul of his thought unchanged.

XIFREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLESMR. FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES is one of the younger poets about whose work there is no veneer. This is not to imply that it lacks finish, but rather that the foundation is genuine; it reflects its native grain, and not an overlaid polish. One feels back of the work the probity and directness that underlie all soundly conditioned literature; for while Mr. Knowles has the poet’s passion for the beauties of the art he essays, the primary value is always in that to be conveyed rather than in the medium of transmission.This sincerity is at once Mr. Knowles’ distinction and his danger. He is so manifestly in earnest that one feels at times in his work a certain lack of the imaginative leaven which should lighten the most serious thought; to put it in a word, there is often an over-strenuous note in his poetry; but were it put to a choice between this mood and the honeyedartificialities to which one is often treated, there would be no hesitancy in choosing the former, forThe poet is not fed on sweets;Daily his own heart he eats,—not morbidly, but finding within his own spirit daily manna, and living by this aliment and not by the mere nectar of things. Everything in life bestows this manna and daily renews it; and the poet is he who assimilates and transmutes it to personal needs until his thought is fed from his own heart as in Emerson’s couplet.This is Mr. Knowles’ ideal of growth, evidenced by the eager interest and open sympathy with which he seeks from life its elements of truth, and from experience its developing properties. It is, of course, an ideal beyond his present attainment, probably beyond his ultimate attainment, gauged by absolute standards, for the “elements of truth” are hardly to be separated from life by one magnet. They are variously polarized, and though one may possess the divining wand that shall disclose the nature and place of certain of them, there is no wand polarized for all; but it is the poet’s part to pass that magnet of truth which is his by nature over the field of life, that it mayattract therefrom its range of affinities, and this Mr. Knowles is doing.Before taking up his later work, however, we may glance at his matin songs,On Life’s Stairway, which have many indicative notes worthy of consideration. This volume, that called forth from John Burroughs, Richard Henry Stoddard, Joaquin Miller, and others, such hearty commendation, has an individuality that makes itself felt. First, perhaps, one notes its spontaneity and the evident love of song that is its primal impulse. The fancy is fresh and sprightly, not having yet thought’s heavier freight; the optimism is robust, the loyalty to one’s own time impassioned and absolute, and the democracy and Americanism distinguishing it are of the commendable, if somewhat grandiloquent, type belonging to youthful patriotism. Another feature of Mr. Knowles’ work, manifest in both volumes, is that its inspiration is from life rather than nature, which is refreshing in view of the fact that the reverse obtains with most of the younger poets. When, however, he comes to this theme, it is with a lightness of touch and a pleasant charm of mood that give to the few poems of this subject an airy delicacy and an unpremeditated note, as in these lines:Illustration of Frederick Lawrence KnowlesNature, in thy largess, grantI may be thy confidant!· · · · ·Show me how dry branches throwSuch blue shadows on the snow;Tell me how the wind can fareOn his unseen feet of air;Show me how the spider’s loomWeaves the fabric from her womb;Lead me to those brooks of mornWhere a woman’s laugh is born;Let me taste the sap that flowsThrough the blushes of a rose,—Yea, and drain the blood which runsFrom the heart of dying suns;Teach me how the butterflyGuessed at immortality;Let me follow up the trackOf Love’s deathless zodiacWhere Joy climbs among the spheresCircled by her moon of tears.In his poems upon love, Mr. Knowles touches some of his truest and surest notes; those in the second volume have a broader and more sympathetic appeal, and yet have not lost the confessional note which alone gives value to the subject. They are not invariably of a more inspired touch than are several in the first collection, such as “Lost Knowledge,” “A Song for Simplicity,” and “Love’s Prayer;” now and again they combine some newly minted phraseflashing with unsullied lustre, with such as have passed from hand to hand in the dulling commerce of language; but it is perhaps too much to demand that all fancies shall be newly stamped with the die of imagination. One of Mr. Knowles’ strongest poems from the group in question is entitled “Love’s World;” but for greater brevity I shall quote instead these charming lines which introduce the collection calledLove Triumphant:Helen’s lips are drifting dust,Ilion is consumed with rust;All the galleons of GreeceDrink the ocean’s dreamless peace;Lost was Solomon’s purple showRestless centuries ago;Stately empires wax and wane—Babylon, Barbary and Spain—Only one thing, undefaced,Lasts, though all the worlds lie wasteAnd the heavens are overturned.—Dear, how long ago we learned!There’s a sight that blinds the sun,Sound that lives when sounds are done,Music that rebukes the birds,Language lovelier than words,Hue and scent that shame the rose,Wine no earthly vineyard knows,Silence stiller than the shoreSwept by Charon’s stealthy oar,Ocean more divinely freeThan Pacific’s boundless sea,—Ye who love have learned it true.—Dear, how long ago we knew!Of this group, however, it is in the sonnet, “If Love Were Jester at the Court of Death,” that Mr. Knowles’ most genuine inspiration has visited him.The conception of the sonnet is unique, and its opening line of epigrammatic force and suggestiveness:If Love were jester at the court of Death,And Death the king of all, still would I pray,“For me the motley and the bauble, yea,Though all be vanity, as the Preacher saith,The mirth of love be mine for one brief breath!”Then would I kneel the monarch to obey,And kiss that pale hand, should it spare or slay;Since I have tasted love, what mattereth!But if, dear God! this heart be dry as sand,And cold as Charon’s palm holding Hell’s toll,How worse! how worse! Scorch it with sorrow’s brand!Haply, though dead to joy, ’t would feelthatcoal;Better a cross and nails through either hand,Than Pilate’s palace and a frozen soul!Here are originality, strength, and white heat of feeling, though the sestett is less artistic than the octave, which holds the creative beauty of the sonnet.Of the lyrical poems in the second volume there are many clear of tone, having not only a pure, enunciative quality musically, but also color and picturesqueness, as that beginning:With all his purple spoils upon himCreeps back the plunderer Sea,with its succession of pictures such as these:O bandit, with the white-plumed horsemen,Raiding a thousand shores,Thy coffers crammed with spars and anchorsAnd wave-defeated oars!Admirable phrasing is that of “wave-defeated oars”! But before taking up the more strenuous side of his work, there is another lyric rich in melody and emotion,—a lyric in which one feels the under-current of passion. It is named, “A Song of Desire”:Thou dreamer with the million moods,Of restless heart like me,Lay thy white hands against my breastAnd cool its pain, O Sea!O wanderer of the unseen paths,Restless of heart as I,Blow hither from thy caves of blue,Wind of the healing sky!O treader of the fiery way,With passionate heart like mine,Hold to my lips thy healthful cupBrimmed with its blood-red wine!O countless watchers of the night,Of sleepless heart like me,Pour your white beauty in my soul,Till I grow calm as ye!O sea, O sun, O wind and stars,(O hungry heart that longs!)Feed my starved lips with life, with love,And touch my tongue with songs!Mr. Knowles is a modern of the moderns, and his Whitmanesque conviction that “we tally all antecedents;” that “we are the scald, the oracle, the monk, and the knight;” that “we easily include them and more,”—finds expression in each of his volumes, in poems ranging from boyish fustian, at which he would now smile, to the noble lines of “Veritas” and other poems in the later work. There are certain subjects that hold within them percussion powder ready to explode at the touch of a thought,—subjects which, to one’s own peculiar temperament, seem to be provocative of a fulminant outburst whenever one collides with them, and this is such an one to Mr. Knowles. However, it is well to be shaken up occasionally by such detonating lines as these:We have sonnets enough, and songs enough,And ballads enough, God knows!But what we need is that cosmic stuffWhence primitive feeling glows,Grown, organized to the needs of rhymeThrough the old instinctive laws,With a meaning broad as the boughs of timeAnd deep as the roots of cause.It is passion and power that we need to-day,We have grace and taste full store;We need a man who will say his sayWith a strength unguessed before:—· · · · ·Whose lines shall glow like molten steelFrom being forged in his soul,Till the very anvil shall burn to feelThe breath of the quenchless coal!Your dainty wordsters may cry “Uncouth!”As they shrink from his bellows’ glow;But the fire he fans is immortal youth,And how should the bloodless know!One will hardly deny that this is sound doctrine, as are the stanzas necessarily omitted, which trace the qualifications of the bard of to-day. Assuredly one touches the question of questions when he seeks the cause for the apparent waning of poetic inspiration in our own time. There is certainly no wane in the diffusion of the poetic impulse; but the poet who is answering the great questions of the age, speaking the indicative words of the future,—to quote Mr. Knowles,A voice whose sagas shall live with GodWhen the lyres of earth are rust,—is hardly being heard at the present hour. There are voices and voices which proclaim truths, but the voice that enunciates Truth in its larger utterance—as it is spoken, for example, in the words of Browning—seems not to find expression in our day. From this the impression has come to prevail that Art is choking virility of utterance, and that a wholly new order of song must grow from newer needs,—song that shall express our national masculinity, our robust democracy, our enlarged patriotism, and our sometimes bumptious Americanism; that labor must have its definite poet, and the “hymn to the workman’s God” contain some different note from that hitherto chanted. To put it in Mr. Knowles’ stirring words from another poem:In the ink of our sweat we will find it yet,The song that is fit for men!And the woodsman he shall sing it,And his axe shall mark the time;And the bearded lips of the boatmanWhile his oarblades fall in rhyme;And the man with his fist on the throttle,And the man with his foot on the brake,And the man who will scoff at dangerAnd die for a comrade’s sake;And the Hand that wrought the VisionWith prairie and peak and streamShall guide the hand of the workmanAnd help him to trace his dream!—Till the rugged lines grow perfect,And round to a faultless whole;For the West will have found her singerWhen her singer has found his soul.These are fine, swinging strophes, proclaiming the modern ideal from Whitman to Kipling that “the song that is fit for men” must have in it some robust timbre, some resonant fibre, unheard before; that a sturdier race of bards must arise, “sprung from the toilers at the bench and plough,”—that, in fine, the new America must have a more orotund voice to sing her needs.This has a convincing plausibility on the face of it; but do the facts bear it out,—are virility and democracy and modernity the essential elements of the “song that is fit for men”? If so, then Whitman, who is the apogee of the elemental and democratic, or Kipling, whose tunes blare in one’s ears like the horns of a band, and whose themes are aggressively of the day and hour, would be the ideal types of the new-day poet, and we should find the sturdy laborer and the common folk ingeneral coming to these sources for refreshment, inspiration, and aid in tracing their dreams; but, on the contrary, Whitman, by a frequent paradox of letters, is a poet for the most cultivated and deeply reflective minds. Only such can understand and embrace his universality, and, on the poetic side, enjoy his splendid diction and the wave-like sweep of his rhythms. His formlessness, which was reactive that he might come the nearer to the common heart, is one of the chief barriers that prevent this contact. The unlettered nature, more than all others, demands the ordered symmetry of rhythm as a focus and aid to thought; it demands elemental beauties as well as truths, and hence not only is Whitman ruled out by his own measure, but Kipling also, for again it needs the broadly cultivated mind to take at his true and at his relative value a poet like Kipling. The common mind might be familiar with some poem of occasion, the English laborer might be found singing “Tommy Atkins;” but Kipling’s finer shadings would escape in the beat of his galloping tunes and in the touch-and-go of his subjects.If, then, Kipling, who outmoderns the moderns in singing what is presumably a song fit for men, and if Whitman, who is as robustly, democraticallyAmerican as a poet can well be, and trumpeting ever that note,—if these poets do not reach the typical man, if they are not the ones to whom the stalwart laborer comes, or the busy man of affairs, there must be a need anterior to that of which they sing; song must spell something else besides virility, democracy, achievement. It evidently is not the men whodo, not the men whoact, that write “the song of fact” for the laborer and the great class of our strong, sincere, common folk. They do not want the song of fact more than do we; they have no other dream to trace than have we. They want the primal things,—love, hope, beauty, the transforming ideal; they want the carbon of their daily experience turned to the crystal; and for this they go to a poet like Burns, who spoke the universal tongue, who took the common ideals and touched them simply, tenderly, not strenuously, to a new form at the will of his fancy. You shall find the boatman or the woodsman knowing his Burns, often his Shakespeare, for he is quick to grasp the human element, or his Scott, for he loves romance, when the strident cry of a Kipling, or of a modern idealist singing of democracy, or of the newer needs of the laborer himself, will be wholly lost on him; and hence this notethat one is meeting so often in the recent poets seems to me to be a false and superfluous one.The “song that is fit for men” isanysong that has the essence of truth and beauty in it, and no otherisfit for men, no matter where sung. We have not evolved a newgenus homoby our conquest of arms; our democracy is not changing human nature; we need virility in song, as Mr. Knowles has said in the earlier poem quoted; we need that “cosmic stuff whence primitive feeling glows,” but we need beauty and spirituality to shape it. Poetry must minister first of all to the inner life. Tennyson and Browning were not concerned with matters of empire, or the passing issues of the day; they were occupied with the essential things,—things of humanity and of the soul, that shall outlast empire, democracy, or time. Heaven forefend that our bards shall spring from a raceUnkempt, athletic, rude,Rough as the prairies, tameless as the sea,rather let them spring from the very ripest, richest-natured class of men and women, not servile to custom, but having the breadth of vision, the poise, the fine and harmonious development that flowers from the highestcultivation, whether in the schools or in life. It did not emasculate the work of Browning or Milton or Goethe, nor of our own Lowell, or many another, that he had the most profound enrichment that education and traditional culture could give him. Originality is not crushed by cultivation, nor will native impulse go far without it. The need is of a poet who shall divine the underlying harmonies of life, who shall stimulate and develop the higher nature, and disclose the alchemizing truth that shall transmute the gross ore of experience into the fine metal of character and spiritual beauty,—such a poet as Mr. Knowles himself may become when his idealism shall have taken on that inner sight of the mystic which now he shows so definitely in certain phases of his work.He is readier in general to see life’s benign face than its malign one, even though shapen by pain and guilt; and this brings us to the group of poems from his new volume,Love Triumphant, turning upon Sin and Remorse, and presenting an element of human passion at once the most provocative of degradation and the most susceptible of spiritual elevation.Whitman approached this theme from the cosmic standpoint as he would approach any ofthe universalities of life, not specifically from the spiritual side, in its destiny-shaping effects. It is from this side that Mr. Knowles essays its consideration, presenting chiefly the reactive, retributive phase of guilt,—the sudden spiritual isolation of the soul that has sinned, as if the golden doors that opened on the world had transformed to iron bars imprisoning the soul within its cell of memory. This sense of detachment, of having unwittingly plucked oneself from the flowering beauty of life, of being irrevocably cut off from sap and stem, which is the first and most palpable phase of guilt, predominates in several of the poems. To consider it first, then, the stanzas called “Lost” may be cited as illustrative:Night scattered gold-dust in the eyes of Earth,My heart was blinded by the excess of starsAs, filled with youth and joy, I kept the Way.The solitary and unweaponed SunSlew all the hosts of darkness with a smile,And it was Dawn. And still I kept the Way.The winds, those hounds that only God can leash,Bayed on my track, and made the morning wildWith loud confusion, but I kept the Way.The hours climbed high. Peace, where the zenith broods,Fell, a blue feather from the wings of Heav’n.Lo! it was Noon. And still I kept the Way.At length one met me as my footsteps flagged,—Within her eyes oblivion, on her lipsDelirious dreams—and I forgot the Way.And still we wander—who knows whitherward,Our sandals torn, in either face despair,Passion burnt out—God! I have lost the Way!Here is strong and vivid imagery, especially in the third stanza,The winds, those hounds that only God can leash,which is a bold and fine stroke not merely in its metaphorical phrasing, but as a symbol of human passions. The entire poem is a vivid piece of symbolism; it is, however, but one phase of the subject, and in “One Woman” and “Sin’s Foliage” one comes again face to face with the same phase, with that terrible memory-haunted eidolon, the visage of one’s own defaced soul. It is in the poem “Betrayed” that a truer perspective begins to be manifest, of which one stanza—Yet were his hands and conscience clean;Some monstrous Folly rose unseenTo teach him crimes he could not mean—introduces a truth that strikes deeper than the mere spell of impulse,—a truth that suggests the mystery of election in crime: whether oneis wholly responsible for the choice which in a moment becomes the pivotal event of his destiny, or whether what Maeterlinck has called the “conniving voices that we cherish at the depths of us” summoned the event, and impelled him inevitably toward its hazard; and, further, whether these voices are not often the commissioned voices, calling one thus to arouse from the somnolence of his soul. On the morrow of the hour in which he has… fallen from Heav’n to HellIn one mad moment’s fateful spell,and finds himself in the isolation of his own spirit,—consciousness will awaken, life will be perceived, sympathy will be born, and Pain, with the daily transfiguring face, will companion him, until in the years he again meet Love and the other fair shapes of his destiny. Since no one remains in the hell to which he has fallen, but by his own choosing, Life rebukes the Art that leaves this sense of finality; for the hour of tragedy is rather the beginning than the end, and often so manifestly the birth of the soul into spiritual consciousness that it may well seem that apparent sin is the mere agency of the higher forces of the nature, the shock that displaces ignoranceand smug self-complacency and both humanizes and deifies the soul.In other poems of the group, however, the developing power of sin, and the remedial forces which it evokes for the renewal of the nature, are dwelt upon, so that the poems are redeemed at the last from the impression of hopeless finality which obtained in the earlier ones.Few of the younger poets have a more vital and personal conviction of spiritual things than Mr. Knowles, and its evolution is interesting to note. There is abundant evidence in his earlier verse that he was bred after the strictest letter of the law; but while his faith was “fixed to form,” it was seeking “centre everywhere,” and the later volume widens to an encompassing view worthy the vision of a poet,—the view that finds nothing impervious to the irradiation of spirit. It is variously sung, but most nobly, perhaps, in the following poem:In buds upon some Aaron’s rodThe childlike ancient saw his God;Less credulous, more believing, weRead in the grass—Divinity.From Horeb’s bush the Presence spokeTo earlier faiths and simpler folk;But now each bush that sweeps our fenceFlames with the awful Immanence!To old Zacchæus in his treeWhat mattered leaves and botany?His sycamore was but a seatWhence he could watch that hallowed street.But now to us each elm and pineIs vibrant with the Voice divine,Not only from but in the boughOur larger creed beholds Him now.To the true faith, bark, sap and stemAre wonderful as Bethlehem;No hill nor brook nor field nor herdBut mangers the incarnate Word!· · · · ·Again we touch the healing hemIn Nazareth or Jerusalem;We trace again those faultless years;The cross commands our wondering tears.Yet if to us the Spirit writesOn Morning’s manuscript and Night’s,In gospels of the growing grain,Epistles of the pond and plain,In stars, in atoms, as they rollEach tireless round its occult pole,In wing and worm and fin and fleece,In the wise soil’s surpassing peace,—Thrice ingrate he whose only lookIs backward focused on the Book,Neglectful what the Presence saith,Though He be near as blood and breath!The only atheist is oneWho hears no voice in wind or sun,Believer in some primal curse,Deaf in God’s loving universe!Mr. Knowles has not embraced the diffusive faith that has no faith to stay it, but is endeavoring to read the newer meaning into the older truths, which is the present-day office of singer and seer. In the matter of personal valor, of optimistic, intrepid mood, Mr. Knowles’ work is altogether commendable. He awaits with buoyant cheer what lies beyond the turn o’ the road. His poem “Fear,” from the first collection, was widely quoted at the time because of its heartening tone, and in his new volume, “A Challenge,” “A Twofold Prayer,” and many another sounds the same invincible note. “Laus Mortis” is a hymn to death holding within it the truer acceptation of that natural and therefore kindly change:Nay, why should I fear Death,Who gives us life, and in exchange takes breath?He is like cordial SpringThat lifts above the soil each buried thing;Like autumn, kind and brief—The frost that chills the branches frees the leaf;Like winter’s stormy hoursThat spread their fleece of snow to save the flowers.The lordliest of all things,Life lends us only feet, Death gives us wings.Fearing no covert thrust,Let me walk onward, armed in valiant trust;Dreading no unseen knife,Across Death’s threshold step from life to life!O all ye frightened folk,Whether ye wear a crown or bear a yoke,Laid in one equal bed,When once your coverlet of grass is spread,What daybreak need you fear?—The Love will rule you there that guides you here!Where Life, the sower, stands,Scattering the ages from his swinging hands,Thou waitest, Reaper lone,Until the multitudinous grain hath grown.Scythe-bearer, when Thy bladeHarvests my flesh, let me be unafraid.God’s husbandman thou art,In His unwithering sheaves, O bind my heart!Mr. Knowles’ work is virile, earnest, individual, free from affectation or imitation; modern in spirit, recognizing the significance of to-day, and its part in the finer realization of to-morrow; sympathetic in feeling, and spiritualin vision. Its limitations are such as may be trusted to time, being chiefly incident to the earnestness noted above, which now and again borders on didacticism. Excess of conviction is, however, a safer equipment for art than a philosophy already parting with its enthusiasms by the tempering of life, being more likely to undergo the shaping of experience without losing the vital part.

MR. FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES is one of the younger poets about whose work there is no veneer. This is not to imply that it lacks finish, but rather that the foundation is genuine; it reflects its native grain, and not an overlaid polish. One feels back of the work the probity and directness that underlie all soundly conditioned literature; for while Mr. Knowles has the poet’s passion for the beauties of the art he essays, the primary value is always in that to be conveyed rather than in the medium of transmission.

This sincerity is at once Mr. Knowles’ distinction and his danger. He is so manifestly in earnest that one feels at times in his work a certain lack of the imaginative leaven which should lighten the most serious thought; to put it in a word, there is often an over-strenuous note in his poetry; but were it put to a choice between this mood and the honeyedartificialities to which one is often treated, there would be no hesitancy in choosing the former, for

The poet is not fed on sweets;Daily his own heart he eats,—

The poet is not fed on sweets;

Daily his own heart he eats,—

not morbidly, but finding within his own spirit daily manna, and living by this aliment and not by the mere nectar of things. Everything in life bestows this manna and daily renews it; and the poet is he who assimilates and transmutes it to personal needs until his thought is fed from his own heart as in Emerson’s couplet.

This is Mr. Knowles’ ideal of growth, evidenced by the eager interest and open sympathy with which he seeks from life its elements of truth, and from experience its developing properties. It is, of course, an ideal beyond his present attainment, probably beyond his ultimate attainment, gauged by absolute standards, for the “elements of truth” are hardly to be separated from life by one magnet. They are variously polarized, and though one may possess the divining wand that shall disclose the nature and place of certain of them, there is no wand polarized for all; but it is the poet’s part to pass that magnet of truth which is his by nature over the field of life, that it mayattract therefrom its range of affinities, and this Mr. Knowles is doing.

Before taking up his later work, however, we may glance at his matin songs,On Life’s Stairway, which have many indicative notes worthy of consideration. This volume, that called forth from John Burroughs, Richard Henry Stoddard, Joaquin Miller, and others, such hearty commendation, has an individuality that makes itself felt. First, perhaps, one notes its spontaneity and the evident love of song that is its primal impulse. The fancy is fresh and sprightly, not having yet thought’s heavier freight; the optimism is robust, the loyalty to one’s own time impassioned and absolute, and the democracy and Americanism distinguishing it are of the commendable, if somewhat grandiloquent, type belonging to youthful patriotism. Another feature of Mr. Knowles’ work, manifest in both volumes, is that its inspiration is from life rather than nature, which is refreshing in view of the fact that the reverse obtains with most of the younger poets. When, however, he comes to this theme, it is with a lightness of touch and a pleasant charm of mood that give to the few poems of this subject an airy delicacy and an unpremeditated note, as in these lines:

Illustration of Frederick Lawrence Knowles

Nature, in thy largess, grantI may be thy confidant!· · · · ·Show me how dry branches throwSuch blue shadows on the snow;Tell me how the wind can fareOn his unseen feet of air;Show me how the spider’s loomWeaves the fabric from her womb;Lead me to those brooks of mornWhere a woman’s laugh is born;Let me taste the sap that flowsThrough the blushes of a rose,—Yea, and drain the blood which runsFrom the heart of dying suns;Teach me how the butterflyGuessed at immortality;Let me follow up the trackOf Love’s deathless zodiacWhere Joy climbs among the spheresCircled by her moon of tears.

Nature, in thy largess, grant

I may be thy confidant!

· · · · ·

Show me how dry branches throw

Such blue shadows on the snow;

Tell me how the wind can fare

On his unseen feet of air;

Show me how the spider’s loom

Weaves the fabric from her womb;

Lead me to those brooks of morn

Where a woman’s laugh is born;

Let me taste the sap that flows

Through the blushes of a rose,—

Yea, and drain the blood which runs

From the heart of dying suns;

Teach me how the butterfly

Guessed at immortality;

Let me follow up the track

Of Love’s deathless zodiac

Where Joy climbs among the spheres

Circled by her moon of tears.

In his poems upon love, Mr. Knowles touches some of his truest and surest notes; those in the second volume have a broader and more sympathetic appeal, and yet have not lost the confessional note which alone gives value to the subject. They are not invariably of a more inspired touch than are several in the first collection, such as “Lost Knowledge,” “A Song for Simplicity,” and “Love’s Prayer;” now and again they combine some newly minted phraseflashing with unsullied lustre, with such as have passed from hand to hand in the dulling commerce of language; but it is perhaps too much to demand that all fancies shall be newly stamped with the die of imagination. One of Mr. Knowles’ strongest poems from the group in question is entitled “Love’s World;” but for greater brevity I shall quote instead these charming lines which introduce the collection calledLove Triumphant:

Helen’s lips are drifting dust,Ilion is consumed with rust;All the galleons of GreeceDrink the ocean’s dreamless peace;Lost was Solomon’s purple showRestless centuries ago;Stately empires wax and wane—Babylon, Barbary and Spain—Only one thing, undefaced,Lasts, though all the worlds lie wasteAnd the heavens are overturned.—Dear, how long ago we learned!There’s a sight that blinds the sun,Sound that lives when sounds are done,Music that rebukes the birds,Language lovelier than words,Hue and scent that shame the rose,Wine no earthly vineyard knows,Silence stiller than the shoreSwept by Charon’s stealthy oar,Ocean more divinely freeThan Pacific’s boundless sea,—Ye who love have learned it true.—Dear, how long ago we knew!

Helen’s lips are drifting dust,

Ilion is consumed with rust;

All the galleons of Greece

Drink the ocean’s dreamless peace;

Lost was Solomon’s purple show

Restless centuries ago;

Stately empires wax and wane—

Babylon, Barbary and Spain—

Only one thing, undefaced,

Lasts, though all the worlds lie waste

And the heavens are overturned.

—Dear, how long ago we learned!

There’s a sight that blinds the sun,Sound that lives when sounds are done,Music that rebukes the birds,Language lovelier than words,Hue and scent that shame the rose,Wine no earthly vineyard knows,Silence stiller than the shoreSwept by Charon’s stealthy oar,Ocean more divinely freeThan Pacific’s boundless sea,—Ye who love have learned it true.—Dear, how long ago we knew!

There’s a sight that blinds the sun,

Sound that lives when sounds are done,

Music that rebukes the birds,

Language lovelier than words,

Hue and scent that shame the rose,

Wine no earthly vineyard knows,

Silence stiller than the shore

Swept by Charon’s stealthy oar,

Ocean more divinely free

Than Pacific’s boundless sea,—

Ye who love have learned it true.

—Dear, how long ago we knew!

Of this group, however, it is in the sonnet, “If Love Were Jester at the Court of Death,” that Mr. Knowles’ most genuine inspiration has visited him.

The conception of the sonnet is unique, and its opening line of epigrammatic force and suggestiveness:

If Love were jester at the court of Death,And Death the king of all, still would I pray,“For me the motley and the bauble, yea,Though all be vanity, as the Preacher saith,The mirth of love be mine for one brief breath!”Then would I kneel the monarch to obey,And kiss that pale hand, should it spare or slay;Since I have tasted love, what mattereth!But if, dear God! this heart be dry as sand,And cold as Charon’s palm holding Hell’s toll,How worse! how worse! Scorch it with sorrow’s brand!Haply, though dead to joy, ’t would feelthatcoal;Better a cross and nails through either hand,Than Pilate’s palace and a frozen soul!

If Love were jester at the court of Death,

And Death the king of all, still would I pray,

“For me the motley and the bauble, yea,

Though all be vanity, as the Preacher saith,

The mirth of love be mine for one brief breath!”

Then would I kneel the monarch to obey,

And kiss that pale hand, should it spare or slay;

Since I have tasted love, what mattereth!

But if, dear God! this heart be dry as sand,

And cold as Charon’s palm holding Hell’s toll,

How worse! how worse! Scorch it with sorrow’s brand!

Haply, though dead to joy, ’t would feelthatcoal;

Better a cross and nails through either hand,

Than Pilate’s palace and a frozen soul!

Here are originality, strength, and white heat of feeling, though the sestett is less artistic than the octave, which holds the creative beauty of the sonnet.

Of the lyrical poems in the second volume there are many clear of tone, having not only a pure, enunciative quality musically, but also color and picturesqueness, as that beginning:

With all his purple spoils upon himCreeps back the plunderer Sea,

With all his purple spoils upon him

Creeps back the plunderer Sea,

with its succession of pictures such as these:

O bandit, with the white-plumed horsemen,Raiding a thousand shores,Thy coffers crammed with spars and anchorsAnd wave-defeated oars!

O bandit, with the white-plumed horsemen,

Raiding a thousand shores,

Thy coffers crammed with spars and anchors

And wave-defeated oars!

Admirable phrasing is that of “wave-defeated oars”! But before taking up the more strenuous side of his work, there is another lyric rich in melody and emotion,—a lyric in which one feels the under-current of passion. It is named, “A Song of Desire”:

Thou dreamer with the million moods,Of restless heart like me,Lay thy white hands against my breastAnd cool its pain, O Sea!O wanderer of the unseen paths,Restless of heart as I,Blow hither from thy caves of blue,Wind of the healing sky!O treader of the fiery way,With passionate heart like mine,Hold to my lips thy healthful cupBrimmed with its blood-red wine!O countless watchers of the night,Of sleepless heart like me,Pour your white beauty in my soul,Till I grow calm as ye!O sea, O sun, O wind and stars,(O hungry heart that longs!)Feed my starved lips with life, with love,And touch my tongue with songs!

Thou dreamer with the million moods,Of restless heart like me,Lay thy white hands against my breastAnd cool its pain, O Sea!

Thou dreamer with the million moods,

Of restless heart like me,

Lay thy white hands against my breast

And cool its pain, O Sea!

O wanderer of the unseen paths,Restless of heart as I,Blow hither from thy caves of blue,Wind of the healing sky!

O wanderer of the unseen paths,

Restless of heart as I,

Blow hither from thy caves of blue,

Wind of the healing sky!

O treader of the fiery way,With passionate heart like mine,Hold to my lips thy healthful cupBrimmed with its blood-red wine!

O treader of the fiery way,

With passionate heart like mine,

Hold to my lips thy healthful cup

Brimmed with its blood-red wine!

O countless watchers of the night,Of sleepless heart like me,Pour your white beauty in my soul,Till I grow calm as ye!

O countless watchers of the night,

Of sleepless heart like me,

Pour your white beauty in my soul,

Till I grow calm as ye!

O sea, O sun, O wind and stars,(O hungry heart that longs!)Feed my starved lips with life, with love,And touch my tongue with songs!

O sea, O sun, O wind and stars,

(O hungry heart that longs!)

Feed my starved lips with life, with love,

And touch my tongue with songs!

Mr. Knowles is a modern of the moderns, and his Whitmanesque conviction that “we tally all antecedents;” that “we are the scald, the oracle, the monk, and the knight;” that “we easily include them and more,”—finds expression in each of his volumes, in poems ranging from boyish fustian, at which he would now smile, to the noble lines of “Veritas” and other poems in the later work. There are certain subjects that hold within them percussion powder ready to explode at the touch of a thought,—subjects which, to one’s own peculiar temperament, seem to be provocative of a fulminant outburst whenever one collides with them, and this is such an one to Mr. Knowles. However, it is well to be shaken up occasionally by such detonating lines as these:

We have sonnets enough, and songs enough,And ballads enough, God knows!But what we need is that cosmic stuffWhence primitive feeling glows,Grown, organized to the needs of rhymeThrough the old instinctive laws,With a meaning broad as the boughs of timeAnd deep as the roots of cause.It is passion and power that we need to-day,We have grace and taste full store;We need a man who will say his sayWith a strength unguessed before:—· · · · ·Whose lines shall glow like molten steelFrom being forged in his soul,Till the very anvil shall burn to feelThe breath of the quenchless coal!Your dainty wordsters may cry “Uncouth!”As they shrink from his bellows’ glow;But the fire he fans is immortal youth,And how should the bloodless know!

We have sonnets enough, and songs enough,And ballads enough, God knows!But what we need is that cosmic stuffWhence primitive feeling glows,

We have sonnets enough, and songs enough,

And ballads enough, God knows!

But what we need is that cosmic stuff

Whence primitive feeling glows,

Grown, organized to the needs of rhymeThrough the old instinctive laws,With a meaning broad as the boughs of timeAnd deep as the roots of cause.

Grown, organized to the needs of rhyme

Through the old instinctive laws,

With a meaning broad as the boughs of time

And deep as the roots of cause.

It is passion and power that we need to-day,We have grace and taste full store;We need a man who will say his sayWith a strength unguessed before:—· · · · ·Whose lines shall glow like molten steelFrom being forged in his soul,Till the very anvil shall burn to feelThe breath of the quenchless coal!

It is passion and power that we need to-day,

We have grace and taste full store;

We need a man who will say his say

With a strength unguessed before:—

· · · · ·

Whose lines shall glow like molten steel

From being forged in his soul,

Till the very anvil shall burn to feel

The breath of the quenchless coal!

Your dainty wordsters may cry “Uncouth!”As they shrink from his bellows’ glow;But the fire he fans is immortal youth,And how should the bloodless know!

Your dainty wordsters may cry “Uncouth!”

As they shrink from his bellows’ glow;

But the fire he fans is immortal youth,

And how should the bloodless know!

One will hardly deny that this is sound doctrine, as are the stanzas necessarily omitted, which trace the qualifications of the bard of to-day. Assuredly one touches the question of questions when he seeks the cause for the apparent waning of poetic inspiration in our own time. There is certainly no wane in the diffusion of the poetic impulse; but the poet who is answering the great questions of the age, speaking the indicative words of the future,—to quote Mr. Knowles,

A voice whose sagas shall live with GodWhen the lyres of earth are rust,—

A voice whose sagas shall live with God

When the lyres of earth are rust,—

is hardly being heard at the present hour. There are voices and voices which proclaim truths, but the voice that enunciates Truth in its larger utterance—as it is spoken, for example, in the words of Browning—seems not to find expression in our day. From this the impression has come to prevail that Art is choking virility of utterance, and that a wholly new order of song must grow from newer needs,—song that shall express our national masculinity, our robust democracy, our enlarged patriotism, and our sometimes bumptious Americanism; that labor must have its definite poet, and the “hymn to the workman’s God” contain some different note from that hitherto chanted. To put it in Mr. Knowles’ stirring words from another poem:

In the ink of our sweat we will find it yet,The song that is fit for men!And the woodsman he shall sing it,And his axe shall mark the time;And the bearded lips of the boatmanWhile his oarblades fall in rhyme;And the man with his fist on the throttle,And the man with his foot on the brake,And the man who will scoff at dangerAnd die for a comrade’s sake;And the Hand that wrought the VisionWith prairie and peak and streamShall guide the hand of the workmanAnd help him to trace his dream!—Till the rugged lines grow perfect,And round to a faultless whole;For the West will have found her singerWhen her singer has found his soul.

In the ink of our sweat we will find it yet,The song that is fit for men!

In the ink of our sweat we will find it yet,

The song that is fit for men!

And the woodsman he shall sing it,And his axe shall mark the time;And the bearded lips of the boatmanWhile his oarblades fall in rhyme;

And the woodsman he shall sing it,

And his axe shall mark the time;

And the bearded lips of the boatman

While his oarblades fall in rhyme;

And the man with his fist on the throttle,And the man with his foot on the brake,And the man who will scoff at dangerAnd die for a comrade’s sake;

And the man with his fist on the throttle,

And the man with his foot on the brake,

And the man who will scoff at danger

And die for a comrade’s sake;

And the Hand that wrought the VisionWith prairie and peak and streamShall guide the hand of the workmanAnd help him to trace his dream!—

And the Hand that wrought the Vision

With prairie and peak and stream

Shall guide the hand of the workman

And help him to trace his dream!—

Till the rugged lines grow perfect,And round to a faultless whole;For the West will have found her singerWhen her singer has found his soul.

Till the rugged lines grow perfect,

And round to a faultless whole;

For the West will have found her singer

When her singer has found his soul.

These are fine, swinging strophes, proclaiming the modern ideal from Whitman to Kipling that “the song that is fit for men” must have in it some robust timbre, some resonant fibre, unheard before; that a sturdier race of bards must arise, “sprung from the toilers at the bench and plough,”—that, in fine, the new America must have a more orotund voice to sing her needs.

This has a convincing plausibility on the face of it; but do the facts bear it out,—are virility and democracy and modernity the essential elements of the “song that is fit for men”? If so, then Whitman, who is the apogee of the elemental and democratic, or Kipling, whose tunes blare in one’s ears like the horns of a band, and whose themes are aggressively of the day and hour, would be the ideal types of the new-day poet, and we should find the sturdy laborer and the common folk ingeneral coming to these sources for refreshment, inspiration, and aid in tracing their dreams; but, on the contrary, Whitman, by a frequent paradox of letters, is a poet for the most cultivated and deeply reflective minds. Only such can understand and embrace his universality, and, on the poetic side, enjoy his splendid diction and the wave-like sweep of his rhythms. His formlessness, which was reactive that he might come the nearer to the common heart, is one of the chief barriers that prevent this contact. The unlettered nature, more than all others, demands the ordered symmetry of rhythm as a focus and aid to thought; it demands elemental beauties as well as truths, and hence not only is Whitman ruled out by his own measure, but Kipling also, for again it needs the broadly cultivated mind to take at his true and at his relative value a poet like Kipling. The common mind might be familiar with some poem of occasion, the English laborer might be found singing “Tommy Atkins;” but Kipling’s finer shadings would escape in the beat of his galloping tunes and in the touch-and-go of his subjects.

If, then, Kipling, who outmoderns the moderns in singing what is presumably a song fit for men, and if Whitman, who is as robustly, democraticallyAmerican as a poet can well be, and trumpeting ever that note,—if these poets do not reach the typical man, if they are not the ones to whom the stalwart laborer comes, or the busy man of affairs, there must be a need anterior to that of which they sing; song must spell something else besides virility, democracy, achievement. It evidently is not the men whodo, not the men whoact, that write “the song of fact” for the laborer and the great class of our strong, sincere, common folk. They do not want the song of fact more than do we; they have no other dream to trace than have we. They want the primal things,—love, hope, beauty, the transforming ideal; they want the carbon of their daily experience turned to the crystal; and for this they go to a poet like Burns, who spoke the universal tongue, who took the common ideals and touched them simply, tenderly, not strenuously, to a new form at the will of his fancy. You shall find the boatman or the woodsman knowing his Burns, often his Shakespeare, for he is quick to grasp the human element, or his Scott, for he loves romance, when the strident cry of a Kipling, or of a modern idealist singing of democracy, or of the newer needs of the laborer himself, will be wholly lost on him; and hence this notethat one is meeting so often in the recent poets seems to me to be a false and superfluous one.

The “song that is fit for men” isanysong that has the essence of truth and beauty in it, and no otherisfit for men, no matter where sung. We have not evolved a newgenus homoby our conquest of arms; our democracy is not changing human nature; we need virility in song, as Mr. Knowles has said in the earlier poem quoted; we need that “cosmic stuff whence primitive feeling glows,” but we need beauty and spirituality to shape it. Poetry must minister first of all to the inner life. Tennyson and Browning were not concerned with matters of empire, or the passing issues of the day; they were occupied with the essential things,—things of humanity and of the soul, that shall outlast empire, democracy, or time. Heaven forefend that our bards shall spring from a race

Unkempt, athletic, rude,Rough as the prairies, tameless as the sea,

Unkempt, athletic, rude,

Rough as the prairies, tameless as the sea,

rather let them spring from the very ripest, richest-natured class of men and women, not servile to custom, but having the breadth of vision, the poise, the fine and harmonious development that flowers from the highestcultivation, whether in the schools or in life. It did not emasculate the work of Browning or Milton or Goethe, nor of our own Lowell, or many another, that he had the most profound enrichment that education and traditional culture could give him. Originality is not crushed by cultivation, nor will native impulse go far without it. The need is of a poet who shall divine the underlying harmonies of life, who shall stimulate and develop the higher nature, and disclose the alchemizing truth that shall transmute the gross ore of experience into the fine metal of character and spiritual beauty,—such a poet as Mr. Knowles himself may become when his idealism shall have taken on that inner sight of the mystic which now he shows so definitely in certain phases of his work.

He is readier in general to see life’s benign face than its malign one, even though shapen by pain and guilt; and this brings us to the group of poems from his new volume,Love Triumphant, turning upon Sin and Remorse, and presenting an element of human passion at once the most provocative of degradation and the most susceptible of spiritual elevation.

Whitman approached this theme from the cosmic standpoint as he would approach any ofthe universalities of life, not specifically from the spiritual side, in its destiny-shaping effects. It is from this side that Mr. Knowles essays its consideration, presenting chiefly the reactive, retributive phase of guilt,—the sudden spiritual isolation of the soul that has sinned, as if the golden doors that opened on the world had transformed to iron bars imprisoning the soul within its cell of memory. This sense of detachment, of having unwittingly plucked oneself from the flowering beauty of life, of being irrevocably cut off from sap and stem, which is the first and most palpable phase of guilt, predominates in several of the poems. To consider it first, then, the stanzas called “Lost” may be cited as illustrative:

Night scattered gold-dust in the eyes of Earth,My heart was blinded by the excess of starsAs, filled with youth and joy, I kept the Way.The solitary and unweaponed SunSlew all the hosts of darkness with a smile,And it was Dawn. And still I kept the Way.The winds, those hounds that only God can leash,Bayed on my track, and made the morning wildWith loud confusion, but I kept the Way.The hours climbed high. Peace, where the zenith broods,Fell, a blue feather from the wings of Heav’n.Lo! it was Noon. And still I kept the Way.At length one met me as my footsteps flagged,—Within her eyes oblivion, on her lipsDelirious dreams—and I forgot the Way.And still we wander—who knows whitherward,Our sandals torn, in either face despair,Passion burnt out—God! I have lost the Way!

Night scattered gold-dust in the eyes of Earth,My heart was blinded by the excess of starsAs, filled with youth and joy, I kept the Way.

Night scattered gold-dust in the eyes of Earth,

My heart was blinded by the excess of stars

As, filled with youth and joy, I kept the Way.

The solitary and unweaponed SunSlew all the hosts of darkness with a smile,And it was Dawn. And still I kept the Way.

The solitary and unweaponed Sun

Slew all the hosts of darkness with a smile,

And it was Dawn. And still I kept the Way.

The winds, those hounds that only God can leash,Bayed on my track, and made the morning wildWith loud confusion, but I kept the Way.

The winds, those hounds that only God can leash,

Bayed on my track, and made the morning wild

With loud confusion, but I kept the Way.

The hours climbed high. Peace, where the zenith broods,Fell, a blue feather from the wings of Heav’n.Lo! it was Noon. And still I kept the Way.

The hours climbed high. Peace, where the zenith broods,

Fell, a blue feather from the wings of Heav’n.

Lo! it was Noon. And still I kept the Way.

At length one met me as my footsteps flagged,—Within her eyes oblivion, on her lipsDelirious dreams—and I forgot the Way.

At length one met me as my footsteps flagged,—

Within her eyes oblivion, on her lips

Delirious dreams—and I forgot the Way.

And still we wander—who knows whitherward,Our sandals torn, in either face despair,Passion burnt out—God! I have lost the Way!

And still we wander—who knows whitherward,

Our sandals torn, in either face despair,

Passion burnt out—God! I have lost the Way!

Here is strong and vivid imagery, especially in the third stanza,

The winds, those hounds that only God can leash,

which is a bold and fine stroke not merely in its metaphorical phrasing, but as a symbol of human passions. The entire poem is a vivid piece of symbolism; it is, however, but one phase of the subject, and in “One Woman” and “Sin’s Foliage” one comes again face to face with the same phase, with that terrible memory-haunted eidolon, the visage of one’s own defaced soul. It is in the poem “Betrayed” that a truer perspective begins to be manifest, of which one stanza—

Yet were his hands and conscience clean;Some monstrous Folly rose unseenTo teach him crimes he could not mean—

Yet were his hands and conscience clean;

Some monstrous Folly rose unseen

To teach him crimes he could not mean—

introduces a truth that strikes deeper than the mere spell of impulse,—a truth that suggests the mystery of election in crime: whether oneis wholly responsible for the choice which in a moment becomes the pivotal event of his destiny, or whether what Maeterlinck has called the “conniving voices that we cherish at the depths of us” summoned the event, and impelled him inevitably toward its hazard; and, further, whether these voices are not often the commissioned voices, calling one thus to arouse from the somnolence of his soul. On the morrow of the hour in which he has

… fallen from Heav’n to HellIn one mad moment’s fateful spell,

… fallen from Heav’n to Hell

In one mad moment’s fateful spell,

and finds himself in the isolation of his own spirit,—consciousness will awaken, life will be perceived, sympathy will be born, and Pain, with the daily transfiguring face, will companion him, until in the years he again meet Love and the other fair shapes of his destiny. Since no one remains in the hell to which he has fallen, but by his own choosing, Life rebukes the Art that leaves this sense of finality; for the hour of tragedy is rather the beginning than the end, and often so manifestly the birth of the soul into spiritual consciousness that it may well seem that apparent sin is the mere agency of the higher forces of the nature, the shock that displaces ignoranceand smug self-complacency and both humanizes and deifies the soul.

In other poems of the group, however, the developing power of sin, and the remedial forces which it evokes for the renewal of the nature, are dwelt upon, so that the poems are redeemed at the last from the impression of hopeless finality which obtained in the earlier ones.

Few of the younger poets have a more vital and personal conviction of spiritual things than Mr. Knowles, and its evolution is interesting to note. There is abundant evidence in his earlier verse that he was bred after the strictest letter of the law; but while his faith was “fixed to form,” it was seeking “centre everywhere,” and the later volume widens to an encompassing view worthy the vision of a poet,—the view that finds nothing impervious to the irradiation of spirit. It is variously sung, but most nobly, perhaps, in the following poem:

In buds upon some Aaron’s rodThe childlike ancient saw his God;Less credulous, more believing, weRead in the grass—Divinity.From Horeb’s bush the Presence spokeTo earlier faiths and simpler folk;But now each bush that sweeps our fenceFlames with the awful Immanence!To old Zacchæus in his treeWhat mattered leaves and botany?His sycamore was but a seatWhence he could watch that hallowed street.But now to us each elm and pineIs vibrant with the Voice divine,Not only from but in the boughOur larger creed beholds Him now.To the true faith, bark, sap and stemAre wonderful as Bethlehem;No hill nor brook nor field nor herdBut mangers the incarnate Word!· · · · ·Again we touch the healing hemIn Nazareth or Jerusalem;We trace again those faultless years;The cross commands our wondering tears.Yet if to us the Spirit writesOn Morning’s manuscript and Night’s,In gospels of the growing grain,Epistles of the pond and plain,In stars, in atoms, as they rollEach tireless round its occult pole,In wing and worm and fin and fleece,In the wise soil’s surpassing peace,—Thrice ingrate he whose only lookIs backward focused on the Book,Neglectful what the Presence saith,Though He be near as blood and breath!The only atheist is oneWho hears no voice in wind or sun,Believer in some primal curse,Deaf in God’s loving universe!

In buds upon some Aaron’s rodThe childlike ancient saw his God;Less credulous, more believing, weRead in the grass—Divinity.

In buds upon some Aaron’s rod

The childlike ancient saw his God;

Less credulous, more believing, we

Read in the grass—Divinity.

From Horeb’s bush the Presence spokeTo earlier faiths and simpler folk;But now each bush that sweeps our fenceFlames with the awful Immanence!

From Horeb’s bush the Presence spoke

To earlier faiths and simpler folk;

But now each bush that sweeps our fence

Flames with the awful Immanence!

To old Zacchæus in his treeWhat mattered leaves and botany?His sycamore was but a seatWhence he could watch that hallowed street.

To old Zacchæus in his tree

What mattered leaves and botany?

His sycamore was but a seat

Whence he could watch that hallowed street.

But now to us each elm and pineIs vibrant with the Voice divine,Not only from but in the boughOur larger creed beholds Him now.

But now to us each elm and pine

Is vibrant with the Voice divine,

Not only from but in the bough

Our larger creed beholds Him now.

To the true faith, bark, sap and stemAre wonderful as Bethlehem;No hill nor brook nor field nor herdBut mangers the incarnate Word!· · · · ·Again we touch the healing hemIn Nazareth or Jerusalem;We trace again those faultless years;The cross commands our wondering tears.

To the true faith, bark, sap and stem

Are wonderful as Bethlehem;

No hill nor brook nor field nor herd

But mangers the incarnate Word!

· · · · ·

Again we touch the healing hem

In Nazareth or Jerusalem;

We trace again those faultless years;

The cross commands our wondering tears.

Yet if to us the Spirit writesOn Morning’s manuscript and Night’s,In gospels of the growing grain,Epistles of the pond and plain,

Yet if to us the Spirit writes

On Morning’s manuscript and Night’s,

In gospels of the growing grain,

Epistles of the pond and plain,

In stars, in atoms, as they rollEach tireless round its occult pole,In wing and worm and fin and fleece,In the wise soil’s surpassing peace,—

In stars, in atoms, as they roll

Each tireless round its occult pole,

In wing and worm and fin and fleece,

In the wise soil’s surpassing peace,—

Thrice ingrate he whose only lookIs backward focused on the Book,Neglectful what the Presence saith,Though He be near as blood and breath!

Thrice ingrate he whose only look

Is backward focused on the Book,

Neglectful what the Presence saith,

Though He be near as blood and breath!

The only atheist is oneWho hears no voice in wind or sun,Believer in some primal curse,Deaf in God’s loving universe!

The only atheist is one

Who hears no voice in wind or sun,

Believer in some primal curse,

Deaf in God’s loving universe!

Mr. Knowles has not embraced the diffusive faith that has no faith to stay it, but is endeavoring to read the newer meaning into the older truths, which is the present-day office of singer and seer. In the matter of personal valor, of optimistic, intrepid mood, Mr. Knowles’ work is altogether commendable. He awaits with buoyant cheer what lies beyond the turn o’ the road. His poem “Fear,” from the first collection, was widely quoted at the time because of its heartening tone, and in his new volume, “A Challenge,” “A Twofold Prayer,” and many another sounds the same invincible note. “Laus Mortis” is a hymn to death holding within it the truer acceptation of that natural and therefore kindly change:

Nay, why should I fear Death,Who gives us life, and in exchange takes breath?He is like cordial SpringThat lifts above the soil each buried thing;Like autumn, kind and brief—The frost that chills the branches frees the leaf;Like winter’s stormy hoursThat spread their fleece of snow to save the flowers.The lordliest of all things,Life lends us only feet, Death gives us wings.Fearing no covert thrust,Let me walk onward, armed in valiant trust;Dreading no unseen knife,Across Death’s threshold step from life to life!O all ye frightened folk,Whether ye wear a crown or bear a yoke,Laid in one equal bed,When once your coverlet of grass is spread,What daybreak need you fear?—The Love will rule you there that guides you here!Where Life, the sower, stands,Scattering the ages from his swinging hands,Thou waitest, Reaper lone,Until the multitudinous grain hath grown.Scythe-bearer, when Thy bladeHarvests my flesh, let me be unafraid.God’s husbandman thou art,In His unwithering sheaves, O bind my heart!

Nay, why should I fear Death,Who gives us life, and in exchange takes breath?

Nay, why should I fear Death,

Who gives us life, and in exchange takes breath?

He is like cordial SpringThat lifts above the soil each buried thing;

He is like cordial Spring

That lifts above the soil each buried thing;

Like autumn, kind and brief—The frost that chills the branches frees the leaf;

Like autumn, kind and brief—

The frost that chills the branches frees the leaf;

Like winter’s stormy hoursThat spread their fleece of snow to save the flowers.

Like winter’s stormy hours

That spread their fleece of snow to save the flowers.

The lordliest of all things,Life lends us only feet, Death gives us wings.

The lordliest of all things,

Life lends us only feet, Death gives us wings.

Fearing no covert thrust,Let me walk onward, armed in valiant trust;

Fearing no covert thrust,

Let me walk onward, armed in valiant trust;

Dreading no unseen knife,Across Death’s threshold step from life to life!

Dreading no unseen knife,

Across Death’s threshold step from life to life!

O all ye frightened folk,Whether ye wear a crown or bear a yoke,

O all ye frightened folk,

Whether ye wear a crown or bear a yoke,

Laid in one equal bed,When once your coverlet of grass is spread,

Laid in one equal bed,

When once your coverlet of grass is spread,

What daybreak need you fear?—The Love will rule you there that guides you here!

What daybreak need you fear?—

The Love will rule you there that guides you here!

Where Life, the sower, stands,Scattering the ages from his swinging hands,

Where Life, the sower, stands,

Scattering the ages from his swinging hands,

Thou waitest, Reaper lone,Until the multitudinous grain hath grown.

Thou waitest, Reaper lone,

Until the multitudinous grain hath grown.

Scythe-bearer, when Thy bladeHarvests my flesh, let me be unafraid.

Scythe-bearer, when Thy blade

Harvests my flesh, let me be unafraid.

God’s husbandman thou art,In His unwithering sheaves, O bind my heart!

God’s husbandman thou art,

In His unwithering sheaves, O bind my heart!

Mr. Knowles’ work is virile, earnest, individual, free from affectation or imitation; modern in spirit, recognizing the significance of to-day, and its part in the finer realization of to-morrow; sympathetic in feeling, and spiritualin vision. Its limitations are such as may be trusted to time, being chiefly incident to the earnestness noted above, which now and again borders on didacticism. Excess of conviction is, however, a safer equipment for art than a philosophy already parting with its enthusiasms by the tempering of life, being more likely to undergo the shaping of experience without losing the vital part.

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