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med peoples by the strong hand of the law. They do not murder as a pastime; they are inclined to be just to each other and to their American hosts, who need only wean them in certain cases from too great a love of the whiskey bottle and thus have in this immigration a strong bulwark of representative government. Night schools should be established wherever there is a large Slavic community, in which the immigrants may be taught the English language by means of their own, and not by the childish system followed in New York City of sending them teachers who know not a word of any idiom except English. It is not remarkable that good results have not been obtained by such faddist methods, which should be universally frowned on. A foreign language can be learned only by means of the language of the learner and not by a silly system of signs and grimaces, to which the New York incompetent teachers have had to resort. Make the immigrant Slav an American as soon as possible and teach him what American ideals are in his own tongue. Then teach him our common speech in the same way and we shall find that the Slav, owing to his fine quality of combination and assimilation, will not be the least notable of our adopted American citizens.

J. DYNELEY PRINCE.

THE POETRY OF WILLIAM

VAUGHN MOODY.

There are a few men among us who in surety of soul find their divinity in the cloistered walks of the art of worship. They are those spirits whose eyes, turned ever inward, are untroubled by the common realities of life. But the great bulk of men we know, live boisterously, working out their wills in the large clay of human circumstance. Now either group I fancy is worthy of respectful envy. For in whichever region men pursue life, the bother and the horror of choice is over Nature hath been parsimonious to most of us, and we go through the years either as body seers or as mind seers, blocking the light and shade of earth into practical data, or blurring it all into spiritual vision. Few there have been who with the full limbs of sensitiveness and power have tried to live life fully; fewer still who have attained a unity of transcendence for its varied parts.

The quest of this unity in all its broader meanings was Moody's life. Pagan and Mystic-those two words that we hear coupled now and then in curious paradox-were Moody's heritage. His sensitiveness to all beauty made the springs of Hellenism sweet to him, and he became a deep drinker at the fount of culture.

But a kind of vastness of spiritual integrity made all his learning passionate, and deep-bathed in the waters of his own individuality. He was like Milton in this respect; without Milton's horizon, yet surely with something of Milton's profundity. It was this that made him understand Dante; that made him able to compose a mystic trilogy, with lyrics which echoed the music of the Bacchae.

Indeed it is this classic culture that stands as an amazing foil to his simple poems upon the themes of everyday. For here, without remote romanticism to lend him magic,

he takes over our common folk words and makes them wonderful. Perhaps by warming them first at the hearth of his heart; as in Gloucester Moors:

A mile behind is Gloucester town
Where the fishing fleets put in,
A mile ahead the land dips down
And the woods and farms begin.
Here, where the moors stretch free
In the high blue afternoon,

Are the marching sun and talking sea,
And the racing winds that wheel and flee,
On the flying heels of June.

Scattering wide or blown in ranks,

Yellow and white and brown,

Boats and boats from the fishing banks

Come home to Gloucester town.

There is cash to purse and spend,

There are wives to be embraced,

Hearts to borrow and hearts to lend,

And hearts to take and keep to the end,

O little sails, make haste!

Then turning with a thought for the ship of the world:

But thou, vast outbound ship of souls,

What harbor town for thee?

What shapes, when thy arriving tolls,

Shall crowd the banks to see?

Shall all the happy shipmates then

Stand singing brotherly?

Or shall a haggard ruthless few
Warp her over and bring her to,

While the many broken souls of men
Fester down in the slaver's pen,
And nothing to say or do?

I do not know what he has done to his words here. Perhaps kept them afloat awhile in the harbor of his heart, before sending them forth upon the sea of poesy. It is strange that in the brief line: "O little sails, make haste!" there is caught the yearning of sea-wife for seaman, the whole lifted longing of those at home for the home-comer. And in the last verse, if you will look again, there is a new vision of the degraded and socially fallen upon our earth, their fever and their pain, and the meaning of their lives in the planet's destiny.

Men have gone to the Greek for its golden gods, for its mythoi, for its sanctities of classic romance, and no one would wish their journeys unstrolled. But few indeed there are who have seen, behind choral music into the Greek tragic heart; few at least who have seen, and found therein an atmosphere natural to their own spirits. Milton, of course, who received into his own muse genuine echoes of Aeschylus, not because Oxford taught him Greek, but because his own soul was Aeschylean. And Arnold at rare intervals when we cry with him for his own unpent emotion. And Moody's genius too, when he drank deepest from the Hellenic spring, partook, I think, of that tragic depth which lies behind music. Those Sophoclean choruses, which must gather into their lyricism the poet's own buoyancy or desolation, played upon Moody's spirit like skilful masters and set up surges in his Northern heart that wailed their way out in dreadful ode and lyric.

One of these is "Jetsam," a bit of spiritual program music in verse. From Nature with her sights and sounds he borrows the bright stuff of his imagery, not through obvious pictures, but by some hinted memory of sweetness or terror. The first lines of the ode are pitched low; the poet beside the river of Death with only the purpose of Death alive in his heart. Then the appearance of the moon in a sudden treble of delight. And since youth and poetry have ever been companioned by her, this sudden

and gorgeous rising bring both back with their old laughter and their old poignancy.

O, who will shield me from her? Who will place

A veil between me and the fierce inthrong

Of her inexorable benedicite?

See, I have loved her well and been with her!
Through tragic twilights when the stricken sea
Groveled with fear; or when she made her throne

In imminent cities built of gorgeous winds

And paved with lightnings; or when the sobering stars Would lead her home 'mid wealth of plundered May Along the violet's path of even song.

Out of her changing lights I wove my youth

A place to dwell in, sweet and spiritual,
And all the bitter years of my exile

My heart has called afar off unto her.

Lo, after many days love finds its own!

The futile adorations, the waste tears,

The hymns that fluttered low in the false dawn,
She has untreasured as a lover's gifts: . .
They are the burden of the songs she made
In coming through the quiet fields of space,
And breathe between her passion-parted lips
Which summers through the dimness of the sea.

Here is not Greek beauty surely, but the beauty of the Greeks operant upon a Northern heart. Here is a turning in upon the very seat and fortress of the emotions, and bringing them into the sunlight with all their bloody pageantry: a secret plundering of the tabernacle of the heart, and a giving of the shewbread to the people. Moody's poetry if one reads enough of it, has a strange fullness about it, head-satisfying and heart-satisfying it seems. While the emotions of the spirit scatter out of doors, the intellect runneth not far behind. For too many

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