XII

XIIALICE BROWNMISS ALICE BROWN has published but one volume of verse; but we live in feelings, not in titles on a cover, and it is possible to prove oneself a poet in one volume of verse, or in one poem thereof. When Miss Brown some years ago paid this tribute at the toll-gate of song by a small volume entitledThe Road to Castaly, it created no inconsiderable comment among lovers of poetry, and there were not wanting those who saw in it as definite gifts as Miss Brown possesses in fiction; but despite the generous recognition which the collection won, she has not seen fit to follow it with others, and with the exception of occasional poems in the magazines, it remains the sole representation of this phase of her work. Yet within a range of seventy pages she has gathered a stronger group of poems than might be winnowed from several collections of some of those who cultivate verse more assiduously. Nor is this to declare that from cover to cover of her volume the inspired touch iseverywhere manifest; doubtless the seventy pages would have gained in strength by compression to fifty. It is, however, to declare that within this compass there is a true accomplishment, at which we shall look briefly.First, then, the work has personality and magnetism, bringing one at once into sympathetic interchange with the writer. The feeling is not insulated by the art, but is imbued with all the warmth of speech; there are no “wires” but the live wires of vibrant words, conducting their current of impulse directly to the reader. One feels that Miss Brown has written verse not as a pleasant diversion, nor yet with painful self-scrutiny, but only when her nature demanded this form of expression, and hence the motive shapes the mechanism, rather than the reverse.Illustration of Alice BrownMiss Brown’s poems are not primarily philosophical, not ethical to the degree of being moralistic; but they have a subtly pervasive spirituality, and in certain lyrics, such as “Hora Christi,” a rare depth of religious emotion. They are records of moods: of the soul, of passing life, of the psychic side of death, of the mutability of love, of ecstatic surrender to nature, of loyalty to service,—in short, they are poems of the intuitions and sympathies,and warm with personality. Perhaps the most buoyant note in the book is that in celebration of the joys of escape from town to country; from the thrall of paving-stones and chimney-pots to the indesecrate seclusion of the pines, where the springy pile of the woodland carpet gives forth a pungent odor to the tread; and where, in Miss Brown’s delicate phrase,the ferns waver, wakened by no windSave the green flickering of their blossomy mind.To read Miss Brown’s “Morning in Camp” is to take a vacation without stirring from one’s armchair,—a vacation by a mountain lake engirt with pine forests, with one’s tent pitched below the “spice-budded” firs and “shimmering birches,” guarded by… the mountain wallWhere the first potencies of dawning fall,and within sight of the shore where… the water laps the land,Encircling her with charm of silvery sand;and where one may lie at dawn in his “tent’s white solitude,” conscious of… the rapt ecstatic birthRenewed without: the mirrored sky and earth,Married in beauty, consonant in speech,And uttering bliss responsive each to each.Miss Brown’s rapt poems in celebration of nature range from the impassioned dignity of her stanzas picturing a “Sunrise on Mansfield Mountain” to fancies so delicate that they seem to be caught in gossamer meshes of song. The poems are somewhat inadaptable to quotation, as several of the best, such as “Wood-Longing,” “Pan,” and “Escape,” are written in stanzas whose exuberant impulse carries them so far that they may not be excised midway without destroying a climax. Upon a first reading of some of these periods they give one an impression of being over-sustained; but the imagery is clear, and upon a second reading one is likely to catch the infection of the lines and be borne on with them to the reversal of his first judgment. “Wood-Longing” thrills with the passion of… the earthWhen all the ecstasy of myriad birthAfflicts her with a rapturous shuddering,and celebrating escape from the thraldom of books, it demands of the soul:Spirit, what wilt thou dare,Just to be one with earth and air?To read the writing on the river bed,And trace God’s mystical mosaic overhead?· · · · ·O incommunicable speech!For he who reads a book may preachA hundred sermons from its foolish roteAnd rhyme reiterant on one dull note.But he who spends an hour within the woodHath fed on fairy food;And who hath eaten of the forest fruitIs ever mute.Nothing may he reveal.Nature hath set her sealOf honor on anointed lips;And one who daring dipsHis cup within her potent brewHath drunk of silence too.What doth the robin say,And what the martial jay?Who’ll swear the bluebird’s lilt is all of love,Or who translate the desolation of the dove?For even in the common speechOf feathered fellows, each to each,Abideth still the primal mystery,The brooding past, the germ of life to be;And one poor weed, upspringing to the sun,Breeds all creation’s wonder, new begun.“Sunrise on Mansfield Mountain,” written in fine resonant pentameter, and building up stanza by stanza to the supreme climax of the dawn, is, as noted above, one of the finest achievements of Miss Brown’s volume, but one that will least bear the severing of its passages from their place in the growing whole. It isfull of notable phrases, as that in the apostrophe,—O changeless guardians! O ye wizard firs!· · · · ·What breath may move ye, or what breeze inviteTo odorous hot lendings of the heart?—wherein the very pungency of the pine is infused into the words. But more adaptable to quotation in its compactness is the lyric entitled “Candlemas,” captivating in form and spontaneity, though no more felicitous in fancy or rhythm than many other of her nature poems:O hearken, all ye little weedsThat lie beneath the snow,(So low, dear hearts, in poverty so low!)The sun hath risen for royal deeds,A valiant wind the vanguard leads;Now quicken ye, lest unborn seedsBefore ye rise and blow.O furry living things, adreamOn winter’s drowsy breast,(How rest ye there, how softly, safely rest!)Arise and follow where a gleamOf wizard gold unbinds the stream,And all the woodland windings seemWith sweet expectance blest.My birds, come back! the hollow skyIs weary for your note.(Sweet-throat, come back! O liquid, mellow throat!)Ere May’s soft minions hereward fly,Shame on ye, laggards, to denyThe brooding breast, the sun-bright eye,The tawny, shining coat!Mr. Archer, in hisPoets of the Younger Generation, quotes this poem as the gem of Miss Brown’s collection; and it certainly is a charming lyric, but not more so to my thinking than several of an entirely different nature, which will also in time’s trial by fire remain the true coin. It needs a somewhat broader and deeper term, however, than “charming” to qualify such poems as “Hora Christi,” “On Pilgrimage,” “Seaward Bound,” “The Return,” “The Message,” “The Slanderer,” “Lethe,” and “In Extremis,” in which life speaks a word charged with more vital significance. “On Pilgrimage” (A. D.1250) reveals an art that is above praise. With only the simplest words Miss Brown has infused into this poem the very essence of pain, of numb, bewildered hopelessness. One feels it as a palpable atmosphere:My love hath turned her to another mate.(O grief too strange for tears!)So must I make the barren earth my home;So do I still on feeble questing roam,An outcast from mine own unfriending gate,Through the wan years.My love hath rid her of my patient heart.(Wake not, O frozen breast!)Yet still there’s one to pour her oil and wine,And all life’s banquet counteth most divine.O Thou, Who also hadst in joy no part,Give me Thy rest!What strength have I to cleanse Thy stolen tomb,For Christendom’s release?Naked, at last, of hope and trust am I,Too weak to sue for human charity.A beggar to Thy holy shrine I come.Grant me but peace!And now in contrast with these exquisitely pathetic lines, to show that the tragic side of life is not alone interpreted in Miss Brown’s verse, and that she sees the temperamental contrasts of passion, witness the cavalier parting of this “West-Country Lover,” to whom the light o’ love is too fatuous a gleam to risk one’s way in following. The dash and spirit of these lines are worthy a seventeenth-century gallant:Then, lady, at last thou art sick of my sighing.Good-bye!So long as I sue, thou wilt still be denying?Good-bye!Ah, well! shall I vow then to serve thee forever,And swear no unkindness our kinship can sever?Nay, nay, dear my lass! here’s an end of endeavor.Good-bye!Yet let no sweet ruth for my misery grieve thee.Good-bye!The man who has loved knows as well how to leave thee.Good-bye!The gorse is enkindled, there’s bloom on the heather,And love is my joy, but so too is fair weather;I still ride abroad, though we ride not together.Good-bye!My horse is my mate; let the wind be my master.Good-bye!Though Care may pursue, yet my hound follows faster.Good-bye!The red deer’s a-tremble in coverts unbroken.He hears the hoof-thunder; he scents the death-token.Shall I mope at home, under vows never spoken?Good-bye!The brown earth’s my book, and I ride forth to read it.Good-bye!The stream runneth fast, but my will shall outspeed it.Good-bye!I love thee, dear lass, but I hate the hag Sorrow.As sun follows rain, and to-night has its morrow,So I’ll taste of joy, though I steal, beg, or borrow!Good-bye!This is as admirable a bit of nonchalance as Wither’s,Shall I, wasting in despair,Die because a woman’s fair?or Suckling’s,Why so pale and wan, fond lover,Prithee, why so pale?with its salient advice to the languishing adorer.Miss Brown’s small volume is by no means lacking in variety, either in theme or form; it is full of spontaneous music, rarely forcing the note in any lyric inspiration. In the sonnet she is less at ease: here one feels the effort, the mechanism; but only four sonnets are included in the volume, which shows her to be a true critic. There are certain poems that might, perhaps, with equal advantage have been eliminated, such as the over-musical numbers to Dian and Endymion; but in the main, Miss Brown has done her own blue-pencilling, andThe Road to Castaly, as stated in the beginning, maintains a fine and even grade of workmanship.In such poems as are touched to tenderness and reverence, half with the sweetness and half with the pain of life, Miss Brown makes her truest appeal. The fine ideality, the spiritual fealty of her nature, as shown in her work, always relates itself to one on the human side. It is not the fealty that shames a weaker nature by its rigid steadfastness, but that in which one sees his own wavering strife reflected. Her lines called “The Artisan,”[2]written since the publication of her volume, are instinct with such feeling as comment would profane. One can but feel, with a quick pang of sympathy, that he, too, makes the appeal:O God, my master God, look down and seeIf I am making what Thou wouldst of me.Fain might I lift my hands up in the airFrom the defiant passion of my prayer;Yet here they grope on this cold altar stone,Graving the words I think I should make known.Mine eyes are Thine. Yea, let me not forget,Lest with unstaunchèd tears I leave them wet,Dimming their faithful power, till they not seeSome small, plain task that might be done for Thee.My feet, that ache for paths of flowery bloom,Halt steadfast in the straitness of this room.Though they may never be on errands sent,Here shall they stay, and wait Thy full content.And my poor heart, that doth so crave for peace,Shall beat until Thou bid its beating cease.So, Thou dear master God, look down and seeWhether I do Thy bidding heedfully.These lines well illustrate the fact that true emotion is not literary nor self-observant, and does not cast about for some rare image in which to enshrine itself. Here is the simplest Saxon, and wholly without ornament, yet who could be unconscious of the heart-beat of life in the words? In her poem, “In Extremis,” one is moved by the same intensity of feelingexpressed in the litany imploring deliverance from fear.Of the more purely devotional poems, “Hora Christi” is perhaps the most reverent, and instinct with delicate simplicity. It is a song of the spirit, interpreting a mood whose springs are deep in the pain of life, but whose hidden wells have turned to sweetness and healing. It is not philosophically penetrative, but a tender, beautiful song warm with sincerity of feeling:Sweet is the time for joyous folkOf gifts and minstrelsy;Yet I, O lowly-hearted One,Crave but Thy company.On lonesome road, beset with dread,My questing lies afar.I have no light, save in the eastThe gleaming of Thy star.In cloistered aisles they keep to-dayThy feast, O living Lord!With pomp of banner, pride of song,And stately sounding word.Mute stand the kings of power and place,While priests of holy mindDispense Thy blessed heritageOf peace to all mankind.I know a spot where budless twigsAre bare above the snow,And where sweet winter-loving birdsFlit softly to and fro;There with the sun for altar-fire,The earth for kneeling-place,The gentle air for chorister,Will I adore Thy face.Loud, underneath the great blue sky,My heart shall pæan sing,The gold and myrrh of meekest loveMine only offering.Bliss of Thy birth shall quicken me;And for Thy pain and doleTears are but vain, so I will keepThe silence of the soul.In glancing overThe Road to Castaly, one notes many poems that might perhaps have represented it better than those chosen, such as “The Return,” “The Unseen Fellowship,” “Mariners,” “Forewarned,” and “Seaward Bound;” but sufficient have been cited to show the quality of the volume and the sympathetic touch which Miss Brown possesses. Her nature poems range from the most exuberant fancy to a Keats-like richness and ripeness of phrase; and her miscellaneous verse from the tender, reverential note of the lyric last quoted to the trenchant scathing lines of “The Slanderer.” It is, in brief, such work as combines feeling and distinction, and leaves one spiritually farther on his way than it found him.[2]Copyright, 1903, by Harper and Brothers.

MISS ALICE BROWN has published but one volume of verse; but we live in feelings, not in titles on a cover, and it is possible to prove oneself a poet in one volume of verse, or in one poem thereof. When Miss Brown some years ago paid this tribute at the toll-gate of song by a small volume entitledThe Road to Castaly, it created no inconsiderable comment among lovers of poetry, and there were not wanting those who saw in it as definite gifts as Miss Brown possesses in fiction; but despite the generous recognition which the collection won, she has not seen fit to follow it with others, and with the exception of occasional poems in the magazines, it remains the sole representation of this phase of her work. Yet within a range of seventy pages she has gathered a stronger group of poems than might be winnowed from several collections of some of those who cultivate verse more assiduously. Nor is this to declare that from cover to cover of her volume the inspired touch iseverywhere manifest; doubtless the seventy pages would have gained in strength by compression to fifty. It is, however, to declare that within this compass there is a true accomplishment, at which we shall look briefly.

First, then, the work has personality and magnetism, bringing one at once into sympathetic interchange with the writer. The feeling is not insulated by the art, but is imbued with all the warmth of speech; there are no “wires” but the live wires of vibrant words, conducting their current of impulse directly to the reader. One feels that Miss Brown has written verse not as a pleasant diversion, nor yet with painful self-scrutiny, but only when her nature demanded this form of expression, and hence the motive shapes the mechanism, rather than the reverse.

Illustration of Alice Brown

Miss Brown’s poems are not primarily philosophical, not ethical to the degree of being moralistic; but they have a subtly pervasive spirituality, and in certain lyrics, such as “Hora Christi,” a rare depth of religious emotion. They are records of moods: of the soul, of passing life, of the psychic side of death, of the mutability of love, of ecstatic surrender to nature, of loyalty to service,—in short, they are poems of the intuitions and sympathies,and warm with personality. Perhaps the most buoyant note in the book is that in celebration of the joys of escape from town to country; from the thrall of paving-stones and chimney-pots to the indesecrate seclusion of the pines, where the springy pile of the woodland carpet gives forth a pungent odor to the tread; and where, in Miss Brown’s delicate phrase,

the ferns waver, wakened by no windSave the green flickering of their blossomy mind.

the ferns waver, wakened by no wind

Save the green flickering of their blossomy mind.

To read Miss Brown’s “Morning in Camp” is to take a vacation without stirring from one’s armchair,—a vacation by a mountain lake engirt with pine forests, with one’s tent pitched below the “spice-budded” firs and “shimmering birches,” guarded by

… the mountain wallWhere the first potencies of dawning fall,

… the mountain wall

Where the first potencies of dawning fall,

and within sight of the shore where

… the water laps the land,Encircling her with charm of silvery sand;

… the water laps the land,

Encircling her with charm of silvery sand;

and where one may lie at dawn in his “tent’s white solitude,” conscious of

… the rapt ecstatic birthRenewed without: the mirrored sky and earth,Married in beauty, consonant in speech,And uttering bliss responsive each to each.

… the rapt ecstatic birth

Renewed without: the mirrored sky and earth,

Married in beauty, consonant in speech,

And uttering bliss responsive each to each.

Miss Brown’s rapt poems in celebration of nature range from the impassioned dignity of her stanzas picturing a “Sunrise on Mansfield Mountain” to fancies so delicate that they seem to be caught in gossamer meshes of song. The poems are somewhat inadaptable to quotation, as several of the best, such as “Wood-Longing,” “Pan,” and “Escape,” are written in stanzas whose exuberant impulse carries them so far that they may not be excised midway without destroying a climax. Upon a first reading of some of these periods they give one an impression of being over-sustained; but the imagery is clear, and upon a second reading one is likely to catch the infection of the lines and be borne on with them to the reversal of his first judgment. “Wood-Longing” thrills with the passion of

… the earthWhen all the ecstasy of myriad birthAfflicts her with a rapturous shuddering,

… the earth

When all the ecstasy of myriad birth

Afflicts her with a rapturous shuddering,

and celebrating escape from the thraldom of books, it demands of the soul:

Spirit, what wilt thou dare,Just to be one with earth and air?To read the writing on the river bed,And trace God’s mystical mosaic overhead?· · · · ·O incommunicable speech!For he who reads a book may preachA hundred sermons from its foolish roteAnd rhyme reiterant on one dull note.But he who spends an hour within the woodHath fed on fairy food;And who hath eaten of the forest fruitIs ever mute.Nothing may he reveal.Nature hath set her sealOf honor on anointed lips;And one who daring dipsHis cup within her potent brewHath drunk of silence too.What doth the robin say,And what the martial jay?Who’ll swear the bluebird’s lilt is all of love,Or who translate the desolation of the dove?For even in the common speechOf feathered fellows, each to each,Abideth still the primal mystery,The brooding past, the germ of life to be;And one poor weed, upspringing to the sun,Breeds all creation’s wonder, new begun.

Spirit, what wilt thou dare,

Just to be one with earth and air?

To read the writing on the river bed,

And trace God’s mystical mosaic overhead?

· · · · ·

O incommunicable speech!

For he who reads a book may preach

A hundred sermons from its foolish rote

And rhyme reiterant on one dull note.

But he who spends an hour within the wood

Hath fed on fairy food;

And who hath eaten of the forest fruit

Is ever mute.

Nothing may he reveal.

Nature hath set her seal

Of honor on anointed lips;

And one who daring dips

His cup within her potent brew

Hath drunk of silence too.

What doth the robin say,

And what the martial jay?

Who’ll swear the bluebird’s lilt is all of love,

Or who translate the desolation of the dove?

For even in the common speech

Of feathered fellows, each to each,

Abideth still the primal mystery,

The brooding past, the germ of life to be;

And one poor weed, upspringing to the sun,

Breeds all creation’s wonder, new begun.

“Sunrise on Mansfield Mountain,” written in fine resonant pentameter, and building up stanza by stanza to the supreme climax of the dawn, is, as noted above, one of the finest achievements of Miss Brown’s volume, but one that will least bear the severing of its passages from their place in the growing whole. It isfull of notable phrases, as that in the apostrophe,—

O changeless guardians! O ye wizard firs!· · · · ·What breath may move ye, or what breeze inviteTo odorous hot lendings of the heart?—

O changeless guardians! O ye wizard firs!

· · · · ·

What breath may move ye, or what breeze invite

To odorous hot lendings of the heart?—

wherein the very pungency of the pine is infused into the words. But more adaptable to quotation in its compactness is the lyric entitled “Candlemas,” captivating in form and spontaneity, though no more felicitous in fancy or rhythm than many other of her nature poems:

O hearken, all ye little weedsThat lie beneath the snow,(So low, dear hearts, in poverty so low!)The sun hath risen for royal deeds,A valiant wind the vanguard leads;Now quicken ye, lest unborn seedsBefore ye rise and blow.O furry living things, adreamOn winter’s drowsy breast,(How rest ye there, how softly, safely rest!)Arise and follow where a gleamOf wizard gold unbinds the stream,And all the woodland windings seemWith sweet expectance blest.My birds, come back! the hollow skyIs weary for your note.(Sweet-throat, come back! O liquid, mellow throat!)Ere May’s soft minions hereward fly,Shame on ye, laggards, to denyThe brooding breast, the sun-bright eye,The tawny, shining coat!

O hearken, all ye little weeds

That lie beneath the snow,

(So low, dear hearts, in poverty so low!)

The sun hath risen for royal deeds,

A valiant wind the vanguard leads;

Now quicken ye, lest unborn seeds

Before ye rise and blow.

O furry living things, adreamOn winter’s drowsy breast,(How rest ye there, how softly, safely rest!)Arise and follow where a gleamOf wizard gold unbinds the stream,And all the woodland windings seemWith sweet expectance blest.

O furry living things, adream

On winter’s drowsy breast,

(How rest ye there, how softly, safely rest!)

Arise and follow where a gleam

Of wizard gold unbinds the stream,

And all the woodland windings seem

With sweet expectance blest.

My birds, come back! the hollow skyIs weary for your note.(Sweet-throat, come back! O liquid, mellow throat!)Ere May’s soft minions hereward fly,Shame on ye, laggards, to denyThe brooding breast, the sun-bright eye,The tawny, shining coat!

My birds, come back! the hollow sky

Is weary for your note.

(Sweet-throat, come back! O liquid, mellow throat!)

Ere May’s soft minions hereward fly,

Shame on ye, laggards, to deny

The brooding breast, the sun-bright eye,

The tawny, shining coat!

Mr. Archer, in hisPoets of the Younger Generation, quotes this poem as the gem of Miss Brown’s collection; and it certainly is a charming lyric, but not more so to my thinking than several of an entirely different nature, which will also in time’s trial by fire remain the true coin. It needs a somewhat broader and deeper term, however, than “charming” to qualify such poems as “Hora Christi,” “On Pilgrimage,” “Seaward Bound,” “The Return,” “The Message,” “The Slanderer,” “Lethe,” and “In Extremis,” in which life speaks a word charged with more vital significance. “On Pilgrimage” (A. D.1250) reveals an art that is above praise. With only the simplest words Miss Brown has infused into this poem the very essence of pain, of numb, bewildered hopelessness. One feels it as a palpable atmosphere:

My love hath turned her to another mate.(O grief too strange for tears!)So must I make the barren earth my home;So do I still on feeble questing roam,An outcast from mine own unfriending gate,Through the wan years.My love hath rid her of my patient heart.(Wake not, O frozen breast!)Yet still there’s one to pour her oil and wine,And all life’s banquet counteth most divine.O Thou, Who also hadst in joy no part,Give me Thy rest!What strength have I to cleanse Thy stolen tomb,For Christendom’s release?Naked, at last, of hope and trust am I,Too weak to sue for human charity.A beggar to Thy holy shrine I come.Grant me but peace!

My love hath turned her to another mate.

(O grief too strange for tears!)

So must I make the barren earth my home;

So do I still on feeble questing roam,

An outcast from mine own unfriending gate,

Through the wan years.

My love hath rid her of my patient heart.(Wake not, O frozen breast!)Yet still there’s one to pour her oil and wine,And all life’s banquet counteth most divine.O Thou, Who also hadst in joy no part,Give me Thy rest!

My love hath rid her of my patient heart.

(Wake not, O frozen breast!)

Yet still there’s one to pour her oil and wine,

And all life’s banquet counteth most divine.

O Thou, Who also hadst in joy no part,

Give me Thy rest!

What strength have I to cleanse Thy stolen tomb,For Christendom’s release?Naked, at last, of hope and trust am I,Too weak to sue for human charity.A beggar to Thy holy shrine I come.Grant me but peace!

What strength have I to cleanse Thy stolen tomb,

For Christendom’s release?

Naked, at last, of hope and trust am I,

Too weak to sue for human charity.

A beggar to Thy holy shrine I come.

Grant me but peace!

And now in contrast with these exquisitely pathetic lines, to show that the tragic side of life is not alone interpreted in Miss Brown’s verse, and that she sees the temperamental contrasts of passion, witness the cavalier parting of this “West-Country Lover,” to whom the light o’ love is too fatuous a gleam to risk one’s way in following. The dash and spirit of these lines are worthy a seventeenth-century gallant:

Then, lady, at last thou art sick of my sighing.Good-bye!So long as I sue, thou wilt still be denying?Good-bye!Ah, well! shall I vow then to serve thee forever,And swear no unkindness our kinship can sever?Nay, nay, dear my lass! here’s an end of endeavor.Good-bye!Yet let no sweet ruth for my misery grieve thee.Good-bye!The man who has loved knows as well how to leave thee.Good-bye!The gorse is enkindled, there’s bloom on the heather,And love is my joy, but so too is fair weather;I still ride abroad, though we ride not together.Good-bye!My horse is my mate; let the wind be my master.Good-bye!Though Care may pursue, yet my hound follows faster.Good-bye!The red deer’s a-tremble in coverts unbroken.He hears the hoof-thunder; he scents the death-token.Shall I mope at home, under vows never spoken?Good-bye!The brown earth’s my book, and I ride forth to read it.Good-bye!The stream runneth fast, but my will shall outspeed it.Good-bye!I love thee, dear lass, but I hate the hag Sorrow.As sun follows rain, and to-night has its morrow,So I’ll taste of joy, though I steal, beg, or borrow!Good-bye!

Then, lady, at last thou art sick of my sighing.

Good-bye!

So long as I sue, thou wilt still be denying?

Good-bye!

Ah, well! shall I vow then to serve thee forever,

And swear no unkindness our kinship can sever?

Nay, nay, dear my lass! here’s an end of endeavor.

Good-bye!

Yet let no sweet ruth for my misery grieve thee.Good-bye!The man who has loved knows as well how to leave thee.Good-bye!The gorse is enkindled, there’s bloom on the heather,And love is my joy, but so too is fair weather;I still ride abroad, though we ride not together.Good-bye!

Yet let no sweet ruth for my misery grieve thee.

Good-bye!

The man who has loved knows as well how to leave thee.

Good-bye!

The gorse is enkindled, there’s bloom on the heather,

And love is my joy, but so too is fair weather;

I still ride abroad, though we ride not together.

Good-bye!

My horse is my mate; let the wind be my master.Good-bye!Though Care may pursue, yet my hound follows faster.Good-bye!The red deer’s a-tremble in coverts unbroken.He hears the hoof-thunder; he scents the death-token.Shall I mope at home, under vows never spoken?Good-bye!

My horse is my mate; let the wind be my master.

Good-bye!

Though Care may pursue, yet my hound follows faster.

Good-bye!

The red deer’s a-tremble in coverts unbroken.

He hears the hoof-thunder; he scents the death-token.

Shall I mope at home, under vows never spoken?

Good-bye!

The brown earth’s my book, and I ride forth to read it.Good-bye!The stream runneth fast, but my will shall outspeed it.Good-bye!I love thee, dear lass, but I hate the hag Sorrow.As sun follows rain, and to-night has its morrow,So I’ll taste of joy, though I steal, beg, or borrow!Good-bye!

The brown earth’s my book, and I ride forth to read it.

Good-bye!

The stream runneth fast, but my will shall outspeed it.

Good-bye!

I love thee, dear lass, but I hate the hag Sorrow.

As sun follows rain, and to-night has its morrow,

So I’ll taste of joy, though I steal, beg, or borrow!

Good-bye!

This is as admirable a bit of nonchalance as Wither’s,

Shall I, wasting in despair,Die because a woman’s fair?

Shall I, wasting in despair,

Die because a woman’s fair?

or Suckling’s,

Why so pale and wan, fond lover,Prithee, why so pale?

Why so pale and wan, fond lover,

Prithee, why so pale?

with its salient advice to the languishing adorer.

Miss Brown’s small volume is by no means lacking in variety, either in theme or form; it is full of spontaneous music, rarely forcing the note in any lyric inspiration. In the sonnet she is less at ease: here one feels the effort, the mechanism; but only four sonnets are included in the volume, which shows her to be a true critic. There are certain poems that might, perhaps, with equal advantage have been eliminated, such as the over-musical numbers to Dian and Endymion; but in the main, Miss Brown has done her own blue-pencilling, andThe Road to Castaly, as stated in the beginning, maintains a fine and even grade of workmanship.

In such poems as are touched to tenderness and reverence, half with the sweetness and half with the pain of life, Miss Brown makes her truest appeal. The fine ideality, the spiritual fealty of her nature, as shown in her work, always relates itself to one on the human side. It is not the fealty that shames a weaker nature by its rigid steadfastness, but that in which one sees his own wavering strife reflected. Her lines called “The Artisan,”[2]written since the publication of her volume, are instinct with such feeling as comment would profane. One can but feel, with a quick pang of sympathy, that he, too, makes the appeal:

O God, my master God, look down and seeIf I am making what Thou wouldst of me.Fain might I lift my hands up in the airFrom the defiant passion of my prayer;Yet here they grope on this cold altar stone,Graving the words I think I should make known.Mine eyes are Thine. Yea, let me not forget,Lest with unstaunchèd tears I leave them wet,Dimming their faithful power, till they not seeSome small, plain task that might be done for Thee.My feet, that ache for paths of flowery bloom,Halt steadfast in the straitness of this room.Though they may never be on errands sent,Here shall they stay, and wait Thy full content.And my poor heart, that doth so crave for peace,Shall beat until Thou bid its beating cease.So, Thou dear master God, look down and seeWhether I do Thy bidding heedfully.

O God, my master God, look down and see

If I am making what Thou wouldst of me.

Fain might I lift my hands up in the air

From the defiant passion of my prayer;

Yet here they grope on this cold altar stone,

Graving the words I think I should make known.

Mine eyes are Thine. Yea, let me not forget,

Lest with unstaunchèd tears I leave them wet,

Dimming their faithful power, till they not see

Some small, plain task that might be done for Thee.

My feet, that ache for paths of flowery bloom,

Halt steadfast in the straitness of this room.

Though they may never be on errands sent,

Here shall they stay, and wait Thy full content.

And my poor heart, that doth so crave for peace,

Shall beat until Thou bid its beating cease.

So, Thou dear master God, look down and see

Whether I do Thy bidding heedfully.

These lines well illustrate the fact that true emotion is not literary nor self-observant, and does not cast about for some rare image in which to enshrine itself. Here is the simplest Saxon, and wholly without ornament, yet who could be unconscious of the heart-beat of life in the words? In her poem, “In Extremis,” one is moved by the same intensity of feelingexpressed in the litany imploring deliverance from fear.

Of the more purely devotional poems, “Hora Christi” is perhaps the most reverent, and instinct with delicate simplicity. It is a song of the spirit, interpreting a mood whose springs are deep in the pain of life, but whose hidden wells have turned to sweetness and healing. It is not philosophically penetrative, but a tender, beautiful song warm with sincerity of feeling:

Sweet is the time for joyous folkOf gifts and minstrelsy;Yet I, O lowly-hearted One,Crave but Thy company.On lonesome road, beset with dread,My questing lies afar.I have no light, save in the eastThe gleaming of Thy star.In cloistered aisles they keep to-dayThy feast, O living Lord!With pomp of banner, pride of song,And stately sounding word.Mute stand the kings of power and place,While priests of holy mindDispense Thy blessed heritageOf peace to all mankind.I know a spot where budless twigsAre bare above the snow,And where sweet winter-loving birdsFlit softly to and fro;There with the sun for altar-fire,The earth for kneeling-place,The gentle air for chorister,Will I adore Thy face.Loud, underneath the great blue sky,My heart shall pæan sing,The gold and myrrh of meekest loveMine only offering.Bliss of Thy birth shall quicken me;And for Thy pain and doleTears are but vain, so I will keepThe silence of the soul.

Sweet is the time for joyous folk

Of gifts and minstrelsy;

Yet I, O lowly-hearted One,

Crave but Thy company.

On lonesome road, beset with dread,

My questing lies afar.

I have no light, save in the east

The gleaming of Thy star.

In cloistered aisles they keep to-dayThy feast, O living Lord!With pomp of banner, pride of song,And stately sounding word.Mute stand the kings of power and place,While priests of holy mindDispense Thy blessed heritageOf peace to all mankind.

In cloistered aisles they keep to-day

Thy feast, O living Lord!

With pomp of banner, pride of song,

And stately sounding word.

Mute stand the kings of power and place,

While priests of holy mind

Dispense Thy blessed heritage

Of peace to all mankind.

I know a spot where budless twigsAre bare above the snow,And where sweet winter-loving birdsFlit softly to and fro;There with the sun for altar-fire,The earth for kneeling-place,The gentle air for chorister,Will I adore Thy face.

I know a spot where budless twigs

Are bare above the snow,

And where sweet winter-loving birds

Flit softly to and fro;

There with the sun for altar-fire,

The earth for kneeling-place,

The gentle air for chorister,

Will I adore Thy face.

Loud, underneath the great blue sky,My heart shall pæan sing,The gold and myrrh of meekest loveMine only offering.Bliss of Thy birth shall quicken me;And for Thy pain and doleTears are but vain, so I will keepThe silence of the soul.

Loud, underneath the great blue sky,

My heart shall pæan sing,

The gold and myrrh of meekest love

Mine only offering.

Bliss of Thy birth shall quicken me;

And for Thy pain and dole

Tears are but vain, so I will keep

The silence of the soul.

In glancing overThe Road to Castaly, one notes many poems that might perhaps have represented it better than those chosen, such as “The Return,” “The Unseen Fellowship,” “Mariners,” “Forewarned,” and “Seaward Bound;” but sufficient have been cited to show the quality of the volume and the sympathetic touch which Miss Brown possesses. Her nature poems range from the most exuberant fancy to a Keats-like richness and ripeness of phrase; and her miscellaneous verse from the tender, reverential note of the lyric last quoted to the trenchant scathing lines of “The Slanderer.” It is, in brief, such work as combines feeling and distinction, and leaves one spiritually farther on his way than it found him.

[2]Copyright, 1903, by Harper and Brothers.

XIIIRICHARD BURTONABOUT a decade ago there came from the press a demure little book clad soberly in Quaker garb, and hight gravely and mysteriously,Dumb In June. The title alone would have piqued one’s curiosity as to the contents of the volume, but the name of the author, Richard Burton, was already known from magazine association with most of the songs in the newly published collection, and also as literary editor of the “Hartford Courant,” whence his well-considered criticisms were coming to be quoted.There was, then, a circle of initiates into whose handsDumb In Junesoon made its way, and quite as unerringly, in most cases, to their hearts, and certain of these will tell you thatDumb In Junestill represents him most adequately; that it has a buoyancy and lyric joy such as less often distinguishes his later work; and this point is well taken from the consideration of magnetic touch and disillusionedfancy; but is it quite reasonable to demand that “the earth and every common sight” shall continue to be “apparelled in celestial light” to the eyes of the poet when the years have brought the sober coloring to our own? that Art shall be winged with the glory and the dream when Life’s wings droop to the dust? Would it be the truest art that should communicate only this impulse? Mr. Burton has not thought so: he has set himself to incorporate, in the life that he touches, the glory and the dream; to lift the weight, if ever so little, from the laden wings, and he uses his gifts to that end.This is not an ideal that can embody itself in lightsome, dawn-fresh songs, as those that came, unsullied of pain, inviolate in hope, from out his nature-taught years; but it is an ideal for which one should barter, if need be, the mere lyric joy of that earlier time. To divine the dumb emotion, the unexpectant desire, of the man of the streets, and to become his interpreter, is a nobler achievement than to catch in delicate fancies the airiest thoughts of Pan. The poet who remains merely the voice of the wood-god, or the voice of the mystic, or the voice of the scholar dreaming and aloof, may float a song over the treetops, but it will not be known at the hearth, which is the finaltest. Not to anticipate Mr. Burton’s later ideal, however, let us return toDumb In Juneand go with him upon the way of nature, unshadowed and elate.It is interesting to note, in studying the formative time of many poets, that nature is the first mistress of their vows, and a less capricious one than they shall find again; hence their fealty to her and their ardor of surrender. Life has not yet come by, and paused to whisper the one word that shall become the logos of the soul; truth is still in the cosmos, the absolute, and one despairs of reducing it to the relative as he might of detaching a pencil of light from the rays of the sun. Nature alone represents the evolved intelligence, the harmony, the soul of the cosmos, and its ideal made real in law; where, then, shall one begin his quest for truth more fittingly than at the gate of nature, where Beauty is the portress and Beauty is the guide?Illustration of Richard BurtonMr. Burton feels the vitality, the personality, of objects in the outer world. There is no such thing in his conception as inert matter; it is all pulsing with life and sensibility. To him May is aSweet comerWith the mood of a love-plighted lass,and henceforth we picture her as coming blithely by with flower-filled hands. This glimpsing of the May is from one of Mr. Burton’s later songs, “The Quest of Summer,”—a poem full of color and atmosphere. After deploring the spring’s withholding, it thrills to this note of exultation:But it came,In a garment of sensitive flameIn the west, and a royal blue sky overhead,With exuberant breath and the bloom of all thingsHaving wonders and wings,Being risen elate from the dead.Yea, it came with a flushOf pied flowers, and a turbulent rushOf spring-loosened waters, and an odorous hushAt nightfall,—and then I was gladWith the gladness of one who for militant months has been sad.The very breath of spring is in this; one inhales it as he would a quickening aroma; it thrills him with the sensuous delight in the color, the perfume, the warmth, of the expanding air; and what delicate feeling for the atmospheric value of words is that which condenses a May twilight into “an odorous hush at nightfall.” The words “odorous hush,” in this connection, have drawn together by magnetic attraction; substitute for them their apparent equivalents,“perfumed silence,” “fragrant quiet,” and the atmosphere has evaporated as breath from a glass; but an “odorous hush” conveys the sense of that suspended hour of a spring twilight when day pauses as if hearkening, and silence falls palpably around,—that spiritual hour when the flowers offer up their evening sacrifice at the coming of the dew.Apropos of the feeling for words and their niceties of distinction as infusing what we term atmosphere into description, it may be said in passing that while Mr. Burton’s sense of these values which is so keen in his prose does not always stand him in equal stead in his poetry, it is seldom lacking in his songs of nature.One may dip into the out-of-door verse at random and come away with a picture; witness this “Meadow Fancy”:In the meadows yonder the wingéd windMakes billows along the grain;With their sequence swift they bring to mindThe swash of the open main,Till I smell the pungent brine, and hear—Mine eyes grown dim—the cryOf the sailor lads, and feel vague fearOf the storm-wrack in the sky.While the metaphorical idea in these strophes is not new, they record with freehand strokesone of those suddenly suggestive moods that nature assumes, one of the swift similitudes she flashes before us as with conscious delight. Mr. Burton’s nature-outlook is all open-air vision; no office desk looms darkly behind it, as is sometimes the case in his other verse. It is the sort of inspiration that descends upon one when he is afoot with his vision, roaming afield with beauty. A leaf torn hastily from a notebook serves to catch the fleeting spell; magnetism tips the pencil; and ink and type, those dread non-conductors of impulse, cannot retard or neutralize its current. This is, in a word, the charm that rests upon the little volume,Dumb In June, in its various subjects. It would be idle to assert that it is as strong work as Mr. Burton has done; but it is vivid and magnetic, and touched but lightly with theweltschmerzwhich life is sure to cast upon maturer work. There is pain, but it is merely artist-pain, in the ode that gives its name to the collection.Among the few love poems in Mr. Burton’s first volume, “The Awakening” is one of the truest in feeling; “Values” one of the blithest and daintiest; “Still Days and Stormy,” reminiscent of Emily Dickinson in manner, one of the most delicate, catching in charming phraseone of the unanalyzed moods of love. The earlier volume has also a captivating poem in the lighter vein, that sings itself into the memory by its lilting rhythm and graceful rhyme-scheme, as well as by its subject. It is the story of Shakespeare’s going a-wooing “Across the Fields to Anne”:How often in the summer-tide,His graver business set aside,Has stripling Will, the thoughtful-eyed,As to the pipe of Pan,Stepped blithesomely with lover’s prideAcross the fields to Anne.It must have been a merry mile,This summer stroll by hedge and stile,With sweet foreknowledge all the whileHow sure the pathway ranTo dear delights of kiss and smile,Across the fields to Anne.The silly sheep that graze to-day,I wot, they let him go his way,Nor once looked up, as who should say:“It is a seemly man.”For many lads went wooing ayeAcross the fields to Anne.The oaks, they have a wiser look;Mayhap they whispered to the brook:“The world by him shall yet be shook,It is in nature’s plan;Though now he fleets like any rookAcross the fields to Anne.”And I am sure, that on some hourCoquetting soft ’twixt sun and shower,He stooped and broke a daisy-flowerWith heart of tiny span,And bore it as a lover’s dowerAcross the fields to Anne.While from her cottage garden-bedShe plucked a jasmine’s goodlihede,To scent his jerkins brown instead;Now since that love began,What luckier swain than he who spedAcross the fields to Anne?Dumb In Junehas many foregleams of the wider vision which distinguishes Mr. Burton’s present work, as shown in his sonnet upon the Christ-head by Angelo, in “Day Laborers,” and in that noble poem, “Mortis Dignitas,” imbued with reverence and touched with the simplicity of the verities. It must be appraised with the best work of his pen, not only for its theme, but for the direct and unadorned word and measure so integral with the thought:Here lies a common man. His horny hands,Crossed meekly as a maid’s upon his breast,Show marks of toil, and by his general dressYou judge him to have been an artisan.Doubtless, could all his life be written out,The story would not thrill nor start a tear;He worked, laughed, loved, and suffered in his time,And now rests peacefully, with upturned faceWhose look belies all struggle in the past.A homely tale; yet, trust me, I have seenThe greatest of the earth go stately by,While shouting multitudes beset the way,With less of awe. The gap between a kingAnd me, a nameless gazer in the crowd,Seemed not so wide as that which stretches nowBetwixt us two, this dead one and myself.Untitled, dumb, and deedless, yet he isTransfigured by a touch from out the skiesUntil he wears, with all-unconscious grace,The strange and sudden Dignity of Death.This is a fitting transition toLyrics of Brotherhood, which, together with his latest volume, presents the phase of Mr. Burton’s work most representative of his feeling toward life. Any poet worthy of the name will come at last to a vision that only his eyes can see. Life will rise before him in a different semblance from that she presents to another; and if Beauty has lured him on, votary to that he might not wholly see, Life’s yearning face wears no disguise, and, once having looked upon it with seeing eyes, it is an image not to be effaced. There are many who look and never see,—the majority, perhaps. Their eyes are holden by the shapes that cross the inner sight, by hope and memory and their own ideal. They shall see only by one of those“flashes struck from midnight” of a personal tragedy—and often enough we gain our vision thus.There is a penetrative insight, that of the social economist, for example, that may possess no ray of sympathetic divination. It may probe to the heart of a condition, correlate causes and tendencies and divine effects, all from a scientific motive as professional as the practice of law, and as keen and cold. One may even be an avowed philanthropist and never come in sight of a human soul, as will the poet who looks upon the individual not as a case to be classified and tabulated, but as one walking step to step with him, though more heavily, whom he may reach out and touch now and then with the quickening hand of sympathy, and whose load he may bear bewhiles on the journey.Such a poet is Mr. Burton, whose nature is shapen to one image with his fellows. To him literature is not an entity to be weighed only in the scales of beauty by the balances of Flaubert; it is to-day’s and to-morrow’s speech. In his prose, especially, this directness is marked; but in his poems one feels rather the inner relation with their spirit, for the magnetism of touch is less communicative than in the more flexible medium of prose. What is communicative,however, is the feeling that Mr. Burton is living at the heart of things where the fusion is taking place that makes us one.Lyrics of Brotherhoodis a genuine clasp of hand to hand, nor is he dismayed by the grime of the hand, for the primal unities are primal sanctities to him. Longing, strife, defeat, achievement, are all interpreted to him of personal emotion, solvent in personal sympathy.Lyrics of Brotherhoodopens with a poem that redeems from odium one opprobrious symbol as old as time. It is that catch-penny epithet, “black sheep,” that we bandy about with such flippancy, tossing it as loose change in a character appraisal and little recking what truth-valuation may lie behind it. It is good to feel that the impulse to redeem this symbol came to Mr. Burton and wrought so well within him, for “Black Sheep” is one of his truest inspirations in feeling and expression:From their folded mates they wander far,Their ways seem harsh and wild;They follow the beck of a baleful star,Their paths are dream-beguiled.Yet haply they sought but a wider range,Some loftier mountain-slope,And little recked of the country strangeBeyond the gates of hope.And haply a bell with a luring callSummoned their feet to treadMidst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfallAnd the lurking snare are spread.Maybe, in spite of their tameless daysOf outcast liberty,They’re sick at heart for the homely waysWhere their gathered brothers be.And oft at night, when the plains fall darkAnd the hills loom large and dim,For the Shepherd’s voice they mutely hark,And their souls go out to him.Meanwhile, “Black sheep! Black sheep!” we cry,Safe in the inner fold;And maybe they hear, and wonder why,And marvel, out in the cold.Throughout Mr. Burton’s work there is a warm feeling for the simple tendernesses, the unblazoned heroisms of life; the homely joys, the homely valors, the unknown consecrations, the unconfessed aspirations,—in a word, for all that songless melody of the common soul whose note we do not catch in the public clamor. There is a tendency, however, in his later work that, from an artistic standpoint, is carried too far,—the tendency to analogize. Everything in life presents an analogy to him who is alert for it; and the habit of looking for analogies andsymbols and making poems thereon grows upon one with the fatal facility of punning, upon a punster. A symbol, or the subtler and more profound analysis that seeks the causal relation of dissimilar things, which we term analogy, must have the magic of revelation; it must flash upon the mind some similitude unthought or unguessed. Emerson is the past-master of this symbolistic magic; they bring him rubies, and they become to him souls, ofFriends to friends unknown:Tides that should warm each neighboring lifeAre locked in frozen stone.Here is the eye of the revelator, for who, looking upon rubies, would have seen in them what Emerson saw, and yet what a truth bides at the heart of this symbol!Mr. Burton has several analogies, such as “On the Line,” “North Light,” and “Black Sheep,” quoted above, that are excellently wrought; indeed, it is not so much the manner in which the analogy is elaborated that one would criticise, as the frequently too-obvious nature of it.The danger to a poet in dropping too often into analogy is that he will become a singer of effects, a watcher of manifestations, and forgetto look for the gleam within himself and make it the light of his seeing. If poetry become too much a matter of observation, of report, vitality goes from it; for imagination is stultified and emotion quenched, and poetry at its best is a union of imagination and emotion. Mr. Burton’s poems in the main escape this indictment, but their danger lies along this line. His perception of identities is so acute, his sympathy so catholic, that not only is nothing human alien to him, but there is nothing in which he cannot find a theme for poetry. For illustration, there is an imaginative beauty in the symbol of the homing bird, but its artistic value is lost from over-use. Mr. Burton has some pleasing lines upon it, reaching in the final couplet a stronger tone, but from the nature of the case they cannot possess any fresh suggestion; on the contrary in such lines as “Nostalgia,” “In The Shadows,” “The First Song,” “If We Had The Time,” though less poetic in theme, there is a personal note; one feels back of them the great weariness, the futile yearning of life. Some of the elemental emotion is in them, the personal appeal that is so much Mr. Burton’s note when he does not give himself too much to things without. Even though one use the visible event but as a signof the spirit, as the objective husk of the subjective truth, it is a vision which, if over-indulged, leads at length away from the living, the creative passion within. One philosophizes, one contemplates, but the angel descends less often to trouble the waters within one’s own being, and it is, after all, for this movement that one should chiefly watch.Message and Melody, Mr. Burton’s latest collection, opens with perhaps his strongest and most representative poem, “The Song of the Unsuccessful.” It is a poem provocative of thought, and upon which innumerable queries follow. Its opening lines utter a heresy against modern thinking; our friends, the Christian Scientists and Mental Scientists and Spiritual Scientists, would at once cross swords with Mr. Burton and wage valiant conflict over the initial statement that God has “barred” from any one the “gifts that are good to hold.” Indeed, the entire poem would come under their indictment for the same reason. But something would be won from the conflict; the stuff from which thought is made is in the poem. In the mean time let us have it before we consider it further. Here are the types marshalled before us; we recognize them all as they appear:We are the toilers from whom God barredThe gifts that are good to hold.We meant full well, and we tried full hard,And our failures were manifold.And we are the clan of those whose kinWere a millstone dragging them down.Yea, we had to sweat for our brother’s sinAnd lose the victor’s crown.The seeming-able, who all but scored,From their teeming tribe we come:What was there wrong with us, O Lord,That our lives were dark and dumb?The men ten-talented, who stillStrangely missed of the goal,Of them we are: it seems Thy willTo harrow some in soul.We are the sinners, too, whose lustConquered the higher claims;We sat us prone in the common dust,And played at the devil’s games.We are the hard-luck folk, who stroveZealously, but in vain:We lost and lost, while our comrades throve,And still we lost again.We are the doubles of those whose wayWas festal with fruits and flowers;Body and brain we were sound as they,But the prizes were not ours.A mighty army our full ranks make;We shake the graves as we go;The sudden stroke and the slow heartbreak,They both have brought us low.And while we are laying life’s sword aside,Spent and dishonored and sad,Our epitaph this, when once we have died,“The weak lie here, and the bad.”We wonder if this can be really the close,Life’s fever cooled by death’s trance;And we cry, though it seem to our dearest of foes,“God give us another chance!”The ease of the poem, the crisp Anglo-Saxon which it uses, the forthright stating of the case for the weaker side, and the humanity underlying it, are admirable; and, further, from an artistic standpoint it is a stronger piece of work than it would have been had its philosophy chimed better with modern thinking. The unsuccessful are speaking; their view-point and not necessarily the author’s is presented. To have tacked on a clause additional, with a hint of the inner laws that govern success, might have saved the philosophy from impeachment as to falling back upon Providence; but it would have been a decidedly false note put into the mouth of the unsuccessful. We may say at once thatThe men ten-talented who stillStrangely missed of the goal,were the Amiels who suffered paralysis of the will to benumb them, rather than those whom it was the will of the Creator to “harrow in soul;” but it would scarcely be expected of the Amiels themselves to analyze their deficiencies thus openly to the multitude. Impotence of will, however, is not at the root of all failure; who can deny that there isThe clan of those whose kinWere a millstone dragging them down;that there areThe hard-luck folk who stroveZealously, but in vain;andThe seeming-able, who all but scored,who put forth apparently more effort to score than did many of the victors, but who were waylaid by some invidious circumstance, or who failed to “grasp the skirts of happy chance” as the flying goddess passed them?Mr. Burton’s poem is too broad to discuss in the limits of a brief sketch; it would furnish a text for the sociologist. All the complexities of modern conditions lie back of its plaint, which becomes an arraignment. Onefeels that if God be not within the shadow, he should at least have given Responsibility and Will surer means of keeping watch above their own. The Omaric figure of the Wheel “busied with despite” rises before one as a symbol of this whirling strife where only the strongest may cling, and where the swift revolving thing, having thrown the weakest off, makes of them a cushion for its turning; or, in Omar’s phrase, “It speeds to grind upon the open wound.”This is the apparent fact; but within it as axle to the Wheel is the law upon which it rotates, the law of individual choice. Each was given his supreme gift; his word was whispered to him; if he failed to hear it, or heed it, or express it in the predestined way, the flying Wheel casts him to the void, but the law is not impeached thereby. Outside this law, however, as spokes to the Wheel, are the innumerable radiations of human laws and conditions, so that one may scarcely obey the primary command of his nature if he would, and often loses sight of it as the principle upon which his destiny is revolving. Mr. Burton’s poem goes beyond the cold-blooded outlook upon the unsuccessful as merely those who are cast from the Wheel, and presents thetruer view that they are by no means always the incompetents or degenerates:We are the doubles of those whose wayWas festal with fruits and flowers;Body and brain we were sound as they,But the prizes were not ours.Why? Let the sociologist or the psychologist determine; in the mean time we have the quickened sympathy that follows upon the poem.Message and Melodyhas a group of songs turning upon some music theme; of these “Second Fiddle” is the most notable. “In A Theatre” discloses a narrative vein and shows that Mr. Burton has a keen sense of the dramatic in daily life. He has for some time been working upon a group of narrative poems with a prologue connecting them, which are soon to be issued, and which, judging from the fugitive examples in his other volumes, will disclose an interesting phase of his talent.To leave the impression of Mr. Burton’s work that is most characteristic,—the impression of its tenderness, its sympathy, its emphasis upon the essential things,—one can scarcely do better than to summarize it in his own well-known lines, “The Human Touch”:High thoughts and noble in all landsHelp me; my soul is fed by such.But ah, the touch of lips and hands,—The human touch!Warm, vital, close, life’s symbols dear,—These need I most, and now, and here.

ABOUT a decade ago there came from the press a demure little book clad soberly in Quaker garb, and hight gravely and mysteriously,Dumb In June. The title alone would have piqued one’s curiosity as to the contents of the volume, but the name of the author, Richard Burton, was already known from magazine association with most of the songs in the newly published collection, and also as literary editor of the “Hartford Courant,” whence his well-considered criticisms were coming to be quoted.

There was, then, a circle of initiates into whose handsDumb In Junesoon made its way, and quite as unerringly, in most cases, to their hearts, and certain of these will tell you thatDumb In Junestill represents him most adequately; that it has a buoyancy and lyric joy such as less often distinguishes his later work; and this point is well taken from the consideration of magnetic touch and disillusionedfancy; but is it quite reasonable to demand that “the earth and every common sight” shall continue to be “apparelled in celestial light” to the eyes of the poet when the years have brought the sober coloring to our own? that Art shall be winged with the glory and the dream when Life’s wings droop to the dust? Would it be the truest art that should communicate only this impulse? Mr. Burton has not thought so: he has set himself to incorporate, in the life that he touches, the glory and the dream; to lift the weight, if ever so little, from the laden wings, and he uses his gifts to that end.

This is not an ideal that can embody itself in lightsome, dawn-fresh songs, as those that came, unsullied of pain, inviolate in hope, from out his nature-taught years; but it is an ideal for which one should barter, if need be, the mere lyric joy of that earlier time. To divine the dumb emotion, the unexpectant desire, of the man of the streets, and to become his interpreter, is a nobler achievement than to catch in delicate fancies the airiest thoughts of Pan. The poet who remains merely the voice of the wood-god, or the voice of the mystic, or the voice of the scholar dreaming and aloof, may float a song over the treetops, but it will not be known at the hearth, which is the finaltest. Not to anticipate Mr. Burton’s later ideal, however, let us return toDumb In Juneand go with him upon the way of nature, unshadowed and elate.

It is interesting to note, in studying the formative time of many poets, that nature is the first mistress of their vows, and a less capricious one than they shall find again; hence their fealty to her and their ardor of surrender. Life has not yet come by, and paused to whisper the one word that shall become the logos of the soul; truth is still in the cosmos, the absolute, and one despairs of reducing it to the relative as he might of detaching a pencil of light from the rays of the sun. Nature alone represents the evolved intelligence, the harmony, the soul of the cosmos, and its ideal made real in law; where, then, shall one begin his quest for truth more fittingly than at the gate of nature, where Beauty is the portress and Beauty is the guide?

Illustration of Richard Burton

Mr. Burton feels the vitality, the personality, of objects in the outer world. There is no such thing in his conception as inert matter; it is all pulsing with life and sensibility. To him May is a

Sweet comerWith the mood of a love-plighted lass,

Sweet comer

With the mood of a love-plighted lass,

and henceforth we picture her as coming blithely by with flower-filled hands. This glimpsing of the May is from one of Mr. Burton’s later songs, “The Quest of Summer,”—a poem full of color and atmosphere. After deploring the spring’s withholding, it thrills to this note of exultation:

But it came,In a garment of sensitive flameIn the west, and a royal blue sky overhead,With exuberant breath and the bloom of all thingsHaving wonders and wings,Being risen elate from the dead.Yea, it came with a flushOf pied flowers, and a turbulent rushOf spring-loosened waters, and an odorous hushAt nightfall,—and then I was gladWith the gladness of one who for militant months has been sad.

But it came,

In a garment of sensitive flame

In the west, and a royal blue sky overhead,

With exuberant breath and the bloom of all things

Having wonders and wings,

Being risen elate from the dead.

Yea, it came with a flush

Of pied flowers, and a turbulent rush

Of spring-loosened waters, and an odorous hush

At nightfall,—and then I was glad

With the gladness of one who for militant months has been sad.

The very breath of spring is in this; one inhales it as he would a quickening aroma; it thrills him with the sensuous delight in the color, the perfume, the warmth, of the expanding air; and what delicate feeling for the atmospheric value of words is that which condenses a May twilight into “an odorous hush at nightfall.” The words “odorous hush,” in this connection, have drawn together by magnetic attraction; substitute for them their apparent equivalents,“perfumed silence,” “fragrant quiet,” and the atmosphere has evaporated as breath from a glass; but an “odorous hush” conveys the sense of that suspended hour of a spring twilight when day pauses as if hearkening, and silence falls palpably around,—that spiritual hour when the flowers offer up their evening sacrifice at the coming of the dew.

Apropos of the feeling for words and their niceties of distinction as infusing what we term atmosphere into description, it may be said in passing that while Mr. Burton’s sense of these values which is so keen in his prose does not always stand him in equal stead in his poetry, it is seldom lacking in his songs of nature.

One may dip into the out-of-door verse at random and come away with a picture; witness this “Meadow Fancy”:

In the meadows yonder the wingéd windMakes billows along the grain;With their sequence swift they bring to mindThe swash of the open main,Till I smell the pungent brine, and hear—Mine eyes grown dim—the cryOf the sailor lads, and feel vague fearOf the storm-wrack in the sky.

In the meadows yonder the wingéd windMakes billows along the grain;With their sequence swift they bring to mindThe swash of the open main,

In the meadows yonder the wingéd wind

Makes billows along the grain;

With their sequence swift they bring to mind

The swash of the open main,

Till I smell the pungent brine, and hear—Mine eyes grown dim—the cryOf the sailor lads, and feel vague fearOf the storm-wrack in the sky.

Till I smell the pungent brine, and hear—

Mine eyes grown dim—the cry

Of the sailor lads, and feel vague fear

Of the storm-wrack in the sky.

While the metaphorical idea in these strophes is not new, they record with freehand strokesone of those suddenly suggestive moods that nature assumes, one of the swift similitudes she flashes before us as with conscious delight. Mr. Burton’s nature-outlook is all open-air vision; no office desk looms darkly behind it, as is sometimes the case in his other verse. It is the sort of inspiration that descends upon one when he is afoot with his vision, roaming afield with beauty. A leaf torn hastily from a notebook serves to catch the fleeting spell; magnetism tips the pencil; and ink and type, those dread non-conductors of impulse, cannot retard or neutralize its current. This is, in a word, the charm that rests upon the little volume,Dumb In June, in its various subjects. It would be idle to assert that it is as strong work as Mr. Burton has done; but it is vivid and magnetic, and touched but lightly with theweltschmerzwhich life is sure to cast upon maturer work. There is pain, but it is merely artist-pain, in the ode that gives its name to the collection.

Among the few love poems in Mr. Burton’s first volume, “The Awakening” is one of the truest in feeling; “Values” one of the blithest and daintiest; “Still Days and Stormy,” reminiscent of Emily Dickinson in manner, one of the most delicate, catching in charming phraseone of the unanalyzed moods of love. The earlier volume has also a captivating poem in the lighter vein, that sings itself into the memory by its lilting rhythm and graceful rhyme-scheme, as well as by its subject. It is the story of Shakespeare’s going a-wooing “Across the Fields to Anne”:

How often in the summer-tide,His graver business set aside,Has stripling Will, the thoughtful-eyed,As to the pipe of Pan,Stepped blithesomely with lover’s prideAcross the fields to Anne.It must have been a merry mile,This summer stroll by hedge and stile,With sweet foreknowledge all the whileHow sure the pathway ranTo dear delights of kiss and smile,Across the fields to Anne.The silly sheep that graze to-day,I wot, they let him go his way,Nor once looked up, as who should say:“It is a seemly man.”For many lads went wooing ayeAcross the fields to Anne.The oaks, they have a wiser look;Mayhap they whispered to the brook:“The world by him shall yet be shook,It is in nature’s plan;Though now he fleets like any rookAcross the fields to Anne.”And I am sure, that on some hourCoquetting soft ’twixt sun and shower,He stooped and broke a daisy-flowerWith heart of tiny span,And bore it as a lover’s dowerAcross the fields to Anne.While from her cottage garden-bedShe plucked a jasmine’s goodlihede,To scent his jerkins brown instead;Now since that love began,What luckier swain than he who spedAcross the fields to Anne?

How often in the summer-tide,His graver business set aside,Has stripling Will, the thoughtful-eyed,As to the pipe of Pan,Stepped blithesomely with lover’s prideAcross the fields to Anne.

How often in the summer-tide,

His graver business set aside,

Has stripling Will, the thoughtful-eyed,

As to the pipe of Pan,

Stepped blithesomely with lover’s pride

Across the fields to Anne.

It must have been a merry mile,This summer stroll by hedge and stile,With sweet foreknowledge all the whileHow sure the pathway ranTo dear delights of kiss and smile,Across the fields to Anne.

It must have been a merry mile,

This summer stroll by hedge and stile,

With sweet foreknowledge all the while

How sure the pathway ran

To dear delights of kiss and smile,

Across the fields to Anne.

The silly sheep that graze to-day,I wot, they let him go his way,Nor once looked up, as who should say:“It is a seemly man.”For many lads went wooing ayeAcross the fields to Anne.

The silly sheep that graze to-day,

I wot, they let him go his way,

Nor once looked up, as who should say:

“It is a seemly man.”

For many lads went wooing aye

Across the fields to Anne.

The oaks, they have a wiser look;Mayhap they whispered to the brook:“The world by him shall yet be shook,It is in nature’s plan;Though now he fleets like any rookAcross the fields to Anne.”

The oaks, they have a wiser look;

Mayhap they whispered to the brook:

“The world by him shall yet be shook,

It is in nature’s plan;

Though now he fleets like any rook

Across the fields to Anne.”

And I am sure, that on some hourCoquetting soft ’twixt sun and shower,He stooped and broke a daisy-flowerWith heart of tiny span,And bore it as a lover’s dowerAcross the fields to Anne.

And I am sure, that on some hour

Coquetting soft ’twixt sun and shower,

He stooped and broke a daisy-flower

With heart of tiny span,

And bore it as a lover’s dower

Across the fields to Anne.

While from her cottage garden-bedShe plucked a jasmine’s goodlihede,To scent his jerkins brown instead;Now since that love began,What luckier swain than he who spedAcross the fields to Anne?

While from her cottage garden-bed

She plucked a jasmine’s goodlihede,

To scent his jerkins brown instead;

Now since that love began,

What luckier swain than he who sped

Across the fields to Anne?

Dumb In Junehas many foregleams of the wider vision which distinguishes Mr. Burton’s present work, as shown in his sonnet upon the Christ-head by Angelo, in “Day Laborers,” and in that noble poem, “Mortis Dignitas,” imbued with reverence and touched with the simplicity of the verities. It must be appraised with the best work of his pen, not only for its theme, but for the direct and unadorned word and measure so integral with the thought:

Here lies a common man. His horny hands,Crossed meekly as a maid’s upon his breast,Show marks of toil, and by his general dressYou judge him to have been an artisan.Doubtless, could all his life be written out,The story would not thrill nor start a tear;He worked, laughed, loved, and suffered in his time,And now rests peacefully, with upturned faceWhose look belies all struggle in the past.A homely tale; yet, trust me, I have seenThe greatest of the earth go stately by,While shouting multitudes beset the way,With less of awe. The gap between a kingAnd me, a nameless gazer in the crowd,Seemed not so wide as that which stretches nowBetwixt us two, this dead one and myself.Untitled, dumb, and deedless, yet he isTransfigured by a touch from out the skiesUntil he wears, with all-unconscious grace,The strange and sudden Dignity of Death.

Here lies a common man. His horny hands,

Crossed meekly as a maid’s upon his breast,

Show marks of toil, and by his general dress

You judge him to have been an artisan.

Doubtless, could all his life be written out,

The story would not thrill nor start a tear;

He worked, laughed, loved, and suffered in his time,

And now rests peacefully, with upturned face

Whose look belies all struggle in the past.

A homely tale; yet, trust me, I have seen

The greatest of the earth go stately by,

While shouting multitudes beset the way,

With less of awe. The gap between a king

And me, a nameless gazer in the crowd,

Seemed not so wide as that which stretches now

Betwixt us two, this dead one and myself.

Untitled, dumb, and deedless, yet he is

Transfigured by a touch from out the skies

Until he wears, with all-unconscious grace,

The strange and sudden Dignity of Death.

This is a fitting transition toLyrics of Brotherhood, which, together with his latest volume, presents the phase of Mr. Burton’s work most representative of his feeling toward life. Any poet worthy of the name will come at last to a vision that only his eyes can see. Life will rise before him in a different semblance from that she presents to another; and if Beauty has lured him on, votary to that he might not wholly see, Life’s yearning face wears no disguise, and, once having looked upon it with seeing eyes, it is an image not to be effaced. There are many who look and never see,—the majority, perhaps. Their eyes are holden by the shapes that cross the inner sight, by hope and memory and their own ideal. They shall see only by one of those“flashes struck from midnight” of a personal tragedy—and often enough we gain our vision thus.

There is a penetrative insight, that of the social economist, for example, that may possess no ray of sympathetic divination. It may probe to the heart of a condition, correlate causes and tendencies and divine effects, all from a scientific motive as professional as the practice of law, and as keen and cold. One may even be an avowed philanthropist and never come in sight of a human soul, as will the poet who looks upon the individual not as a case to be classified and tabulated, but as one walking step to step with him, though more heavily, whom he may reach out and touch now and then with the quickening hand of sympathy, and whose load he may bear bewhiles on the journey.

Such a poet is Mr. Burton, whose nature is shapen to one image with his fellows. To him literature is not an entity to be weighed only in the scales of beauty by the balances of Flaubert; it is to-day’s and to-morrow’s speech. In his prose, especially, this directness is marked; but in his poems one feels rather the inner relation with their spirit, for the magnetism of touch is less communicative than in the more flexible medium of prose. What is communicative,however, is the feeling that Mr. Burton is living at the heart of things where the fusion is taking place that makes us one.Lyrics of Brotherhoodis a genuine clasp of hand to hand, nor is he dismayed by the grime of the hand, for the primal unities are primal sanctities to him. Longing, strife, defeat, achievement, are all interpreted to him of personal emotion, solvent in personal sympathy.

Lyrics of Brotherhoodopens with a poem that redeems from odium one opprobrious symbol as old as time. It is that catch-penny epithet, “black sheep,” that we bandy about with such flippancy, tossing it as loose change in a character appraisal and little recking what truth-valuation may lie behind it. It is good to feel that the impulse to redeem this symbol came to Mr. Burton and wrought so well within him, for “Black Sheep” is one of his truest inspirations in feeling and expression:

From their folded mates they wander far,Their ways seem harsh and wild;They follow the beck of a baleful star,Their paths are dream-beguiled.Yet haply they sought but a wider range,Some loftier mountain-slope,And little recked of the country strangeBeyond the gates of hope.And haply a bell with a luring callSummoned their feet to treadMidst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfallAnd the lurking snare are spread.Maybe, in spite of their tameless daysOf outcast liberty,They’re sick at heart for the homely waysWhere their gathered brothers be.And oft at night, when the plains fall darkAnd the hills loom large and dim,For the Shepherd’s voice they mutely hark,And their souls go out to him.Meanwhile, “Black sheep! Black sheep!” we cry,Safe in the inner fold;And maybe they hear, and wonder why,And marvel, out in the cold.

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

From their folded mates they wander far,

Their ways seem harsh and wild;

They follow the beck of a baleful star,

Their paths are dream-beguiled.

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

Yet haply they sought but a wider range,

Some loftier mountain-slope,

And little recked of the country strange

Beyond the gates of hope.

And haply a bell with a luring callSummoned their feet to treadMidst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfallAnd the lurking snare are spread.

And haply a bell with a luring call

Summoned their feet to tread

Midst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfall

And the lurking snare are spread.

Maybe, in spite of their tameless daysOf outcast liberty,They’re sick at heart for the homely waysWhere their gathered brothers be.

Maybe, in spite of their tameless days

Of outcast liberty,

They’re sick at heart for the homely ways

Where their gathered brothers be.

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

And oft at night, when the plains fall dark

And the hills loom large and dim,

For the Shepherd’s voice they mutely hark,

And their souls go out to him.

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

Meanwhile, “Black sheep! Black sheep!” we cry,

Safe in the inner fold;

And maybe they hear, and wonder why,

And marvel, out in the cold.

Throughout Mr. Burton’s work there is a warm feeling for the simple tendernesses, the unblazoned heroisms of life; the homely joys, the homely valors, the unknown consecrations, the unconfessed aspirations,—in a word, for all that songless melody of the common soul whose note we do not catch in the public clamor. There is a tendency, however, in his later work that, from an artistic standpoint, is carried too far,—the tendency to analogize. Everything in life presents an analogy to him who is alert for it; and the habit of looking for analogies andsymbols and making poems thereon grows upon one with the fatal facility of punning, upon a punster. A symbol, or the subtler and more profound analysis that seeks the causal relation of dissimilar things, which we term analogy, must have the magic of revelation; it must flash upon the mind some similitude unthought or unguessed. Emerson is the past-master of this symbolistic magic; they bring him rubies, and they become to him souls, of

Friends to friends unknown:Tides that should warm each neighboring lifeAre locked in frozen stone.

Friends to friends unknown:

Tides that should warm each neighboring life

Are locked in frozen stone.

Here is the eye of the revelator, for who, looking upon rubies, would have seen in them what Emerson saw, and yet what a truth bides at the heart of this symbol!

Mr. Burton has several analogies, such as “On the Line,” “North Light,” and “Black Sheep,” quoted above, that are excellently wrought; indeed, it is not so much the manner in which the analogy is elaborated that one would criticise, as the frequently too-obvious nature of it.

The danger to a poet in dropping too often into analogy is that he will become a singer of effects, a watcher of manifestations, and forgetto look for the gleam within himself and make it the light of his seeing. If poetry become too much a matter of observation, of report, vitality goes from it; for imagination is stultified and emotion quenched, and poetry at its best is a union of imagination and emotion. Mr. Burton’s poems in the main escape this indictment, but their danger lies along this line. His perception of identities is so acute, his sympathy so catholic, that not only is nothing human alien to him, but there is nothing in which he cannot find a theme for poetry. For illustration, there is an imaginative beauty in the symbol of the homing bird, but its artistic value is lost from over-use. Mr. Burton has some pleasing lines upon it, reaching in the final couplet a stronger tone, but from the nature of the case they cannot possess any fresh suggestion; on the contrary in such lines as “Nostalgia,” “In The Shadows,” “The First Song,” “If We Had The Time,” though less poetic in theme, there is a personal note; one feels back of them the great weariness, the futile yearning of life. Some of the elemental emotion is in them, the personal appeal that is so much Mr. Burton’s note when he does not give himself too much to things without. Even though one use the visible event but as a signof the spirit, as the objective husk of the subjective truth, it is a vision which, if over-indulged, leads at length away from the living, the creative passion within. One philosophizes, one contemplates, but the angel descends less often to trouble the waters within one’s own being, and it is, after all, for this movement that one should chiefly watch.

Message and Melody, Mr. Burton’s latest collection, opens with perhaps his strongest and most representative poem, “The Song of the Unsuccessful.” It is a poem provocative of thought, and upon which innumerable queries follow. Its opening lines utter a heresy against modern thinking; our friends, the Christian Scientists and Mental Scientists and Spiritual Scientists, would at once cross swords with Mr. Burton and wage valiant conflict over the initial statement that God has “barred” from any one the “gifts that are good to hold.” Indeed, the entire poem would come under their indictment for the same reason. But something would be won from the conflict; the stuff from which thought is made is in the poem. In the mean time let us have it before we consider it further. Here are the types marshalled before us; we recognize them all as they appear:

We are the toilers from whom God barredThe gifts that are good to hold.We meant full well, and we tried full hard,And our failures were manifold.And we are the clan of those whose kinWere a millstone dragging them down.Yea, we had to sweat for our brother’s sinAnd lose the victor’s crown.The seeming-able, who all but scored,From their teeming tribe we come:What was there wrong with us, O Lord,That our lives were dark and dumb?The men ten-talented, who stillStrangely missed of the goal,Of them we are: it seems Thy willTo harrow some in soul.We are the sinners, too, whose lustConquered the higher claims;We sat us prone in the common dust,And played at the devil’s games.We are the hard-luck folk, who stroveZealously, but in vain:We lost and lost, while our comrades throve,And still we lost again.We are the doubles of those whose wayWas festal with fruits and flowers;Body and brain we were sound as they,But the prizes were not ours.A mighty army our full ranks make;We shake the graves as we go;The sudden stroke and the slow heartbreak,They both have brought us low.And while we are laying life’s sword aside,Spent and dishonored and sad,Our epitaph this, when once we have died,“The weak lie here, and the bad.”We wonder if this can be really the close,Life’s fever cooled by death’s trance;And we cry, though it seem to our dearest of foes,“God give us another chance!”

We are the toilers from whom God barredThe gifts that are good to hold.We meant full well, and we tried full hard,And our failures were manifold.

We are the toilers from whom God barred

The gifts that are good to hold.

We meant full well, and we tried full hard,

And our failures were manifold.

And we are the clan of those whose kinWere a millstone dragging them down.Yea, we had to sweat for our brother’s sinAnd lose the victor’s crown.

And we are the clan of those whose kin

Were a millstone dragging them down.

Yea, we had to sweat for our brother’s sin

And lose the victor’s crown.

The seeming-able, who all but scored,From their teeming tribe we come:What was there wrong with us, O Lord,That our lives were dark and dumb?

The seeming-able, who all but scored,

From their teeming tribe we come:

What was there wrong with us, O Lord,

That our lives were dark and dumb?

The men ten-talented, who stillStrangely missed of the goal,Of them we are: it seems Thy willTo harrow some in soul.

The men ten-talented, who still

Strangely missed of the goal,

Of them we are: it seems Thy will

To harrow some in soul.

We are the sinners, too, whose lustConquered the higher claims;We sat us prone in the common dust,And played at the devil’s games.

We are the sinners, too, whose lust

Conquered the higher claims;

We sat us prone in the common dust,

And played at the devil’s games.

We are the hard-luck folk, who stroveZealously, but in vain:We lost and lost, while our comrades throve,And still we lost again.

We are the hard-luck folk, who strove

Zealously, but in vain:

We lost and lost, while our comrades throve,

And still we lost again.

We are the doubles of those whose wayWas festal with fruits and flowers;Body and brain we were sound as they,But the prizes were not ours.

We are the doubles of those whose way

Was festal with fruits and flowers;

Body and brain we were sound as they,

But the prizes were not ours.

A mighty army our full ranks make;We shake the graves as we go;The sudden stroke and the slow heartbreak,They both have brought us low.

A mighty army our full ranks make;

We shake the graves as we go;

The sudden stroke and the slow heartbreak,

They both have brought us low.

And while we are laying life’s sword aside,Spent and dishonored and sad,Our epitaph this, when once we have died,“The weak lie here, and the bad.”

And while we are laying life’s sword aside,

Spent and dishonored and sad,

Our epitaph this, when once we have died,

“The weak lie here, and the bad.”

We wonder if this can be really the close,Life’s fever cooled by death’s trance;And we cry, though it seem to our dearest of foes,“God give us another chance!”

We wonder if this can be really the close,

Life’s fever cooled by death’s trance;

And we cry, though it seem to our dearest of foes,

“God give us another chance!”

The ease of the poem, the crisp Anglo-Saxon which it uses, the forthright stating of the case for the weaker side, and the humanity underlying it, are admirable; and, further, from an artistic standpoint it is a stronger piece of work than it would have been had its philosophy chimed better with modern thinking. The unsuccessful are speaking; their view-point and not necessarily the author’s is presented. To have tacked on a clause additional, with a hint of the inner laws that govern success, might have saved the philosophy from impeachment as to falling back upon Providence; but it would have been a decidedly false note put into the mouth of the unsuccessful. We may say at once that

The men ten-talented who stillStrangely missed of the goal,

The men ten-talented who still

Strangely missed of the goal,

were the Amiels who suffered paralysis of the will to benumb them, rather than those whom it was the will of the Creator to “harrow in soul;” but it would scarcely be expected of the Amiels themselves to analyze their deficiencies thus openly to the multitude. Impotence of will, however, is not at the root of all failure; who can deny that there is

The clan of those whose kinWere a millstone dragging them down;

The clan of those whose kin

Were a millstone dragging them down;

that there are

The hard-luck folk who stroveZealously, but in vain;

The hard-luck folk who strove

Zealously, but in vain;

and

The seeming-able, who all but scored,

who put forth apparently more effort to score than did many of the victors, but who were waylaid by some invidious circumstance, or who failed to “grasp the skirts of happy chance” as the flying goddess passed them?

Mr. Burton’s poem is too broad to discuss in the limits of a brief sketch; it would furnish a text for the sociologist. All the complexities of modern conditions lie back of its plaint, which becomes an arraignment. Onefeels that if God be not within the shadow, he should at least have given Responsibility and Will surer means of keeping watch above their own. The Omaric figure of the Wheel “busied with despite” rises before one as a symbol of this whirling strife where only the strongest may cling, and where the swift revolving thing, having thrown the weakest off, makes of them a cushion for its turning; or, in Omar’s phrase, “It speeds to grind upon the open wound.”

This is the apparent fact; but within it as axle to the Wheel is the law upon which it rotates, the law of individual choice. Each was given his supreme gift; his word was whispered to him; if he failed to hear it, or heed it, or express it in the predestined way, the flying Wheel casts him to the void, but the law is not impeached thereby. Outside this law, however, as spokes to the Wheel, are the innumerable radiations of human laws and conditions, so that one may scarcely obey the primary command of his nature if he would, and often loses sight of it as the principle upon which his destiny is revolving. Mr. Burton’s poem goes beyond the cold-blooded outlook upon the unsuccessful as merely those who are cast from the Wheel, and presents thetruer view that they are by no means always the incompetents or degenerates:

We are the doubles of those whose wayWas festal with fruits and flowers;Body and brain we were sound as they,But the prizes were not ours.

We are the doubles of those whose way

Was festal with fruits and flowers;

Body and brain we were sound as they,

But the prizes were not ours.

Why? Let the sociologist or the psychologist determine; in the mean time we have the quickened sympathy that follows upon the poem.

Message and Melodyhas a group of songs turning upon some music theme; of these “Second Fiddle” is the most notable. “In A Theatre” discloses a narrative vein and shows that Mr. Burton has a keen sense of the dramatic in daily life. He has for some time been working upon a group of narrative poems with a prologue connecting them, which are soon to be issued, and which, judging from the fugitive examples in his other volumes, will disclose an interesting phase of his talent.

To leave the impression of Mr. Burton’s work that is most characteristic,—the impression of its tenderness, its sympathy, its emphasis upon the essential things,—one can scarcely do better than to summarize it in his own well-known lines, “The Human Touch”:

High thoughts and noble in all landsHelp me; my soul is fed by such.But ah, the touch of lips and hands,—The human touch!Warm, vital, close, life’s symbols dear,—These need I most, and now, and here.

High thoughts and noble in all lands

Help me; my soul is fed by such.

But ah, the touch of lips and hands,—

The human touch!

Warm, vital, close, life’s symbols dear,—

These need I most, and now, and here.

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