And on the last blue noon in May-
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly

Two petals from that wild-rose tree.

"ENAMORED ARCHITECT OF AIRY RHYME"

Enamored architect of airy rhyme,

Build as thou wilt, heed not what each man says.

Good souls, but innocent of dreamers' ways,

Will come, and marvel why thou wastest time;

Others, beholding how thy turrets climb

'Twixt theirs and heaven, will hate thee all thy days;
But most beware of those who come to praise.
O Wondersmith, O worker in sublime

And heaven-sent dreams, let art be all in all;
Build as thou wilt, unspoiled by praise or blame,
Build as thou wilt, and as thy light is given;
Then, if at last the airy structure fall,
Dissolve, and vanish-take thyself no shame.
They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.

TWO QUATRAINS

MAPLE LEAVES

October turned my maple's leaves to gold;

The most are gone now; here and there one lingers: Soon these will slip from out the twigs' weak hold, Like coins between a dying miser's fingers.

PESSIMIST AND OPTIMIST

This one sits shivering in Fortune's smile,
Taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath.
This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while
Laughs in the teeth of Death.

John Hay

John Hay was born at Salem, Indiana, in 1838, graduated from Brown University in 1858 and was admitted to the Illinois bar a few years later. At nineteen, when he went back to Warsaw, the little Mississippi town where he had lived as a boy, he dreamed only of being a poet-a poet, it must be added, of the pleasantly conventional, transition type. But the Civil War was to disturb his mild fantasies. He became private secretary to Lincoln, then major and assistant adjutantgeneral under General Gilmore, then secretary of the Legation at Paris, chargé d'affaires at Vienna and secretary of legation at Madrid.

His few vivid Pike County Ballads came more as a happy accident than as a deliberate creative effort. When Hay returned from Spain in 1870, bringing with him his Castilian Days, he still had visions of becoming an orthodox lyric poet. But he found everyone reading Bret Harte's short stories and the new expression of the rude West. (See Preface.) He speculated upon the possibility of doing something similar, translating the characters into poetry. The result was the six racy ballads in a vein utterly different from everything Hay wrote before or after. The poet-politician seems to have regarded this series somewhat in the nature of light, extempore verse, belonging to a far lower plane than his serious publications; he talked about them reluctantly, he even hoped that they would be forgotten. It is difficult to say whether this regret grew because Hay,

loving the refinements of culture, at heart hated any suggestion of vulgarity, or because of a basic lack of courage-Hay having published his novel of labor unrest in the early 80's (The Breadwinners) anonymously.

The fact remains, his rhymes of Pike County have survived all his more classical lines. They served for a time as a fresh influence, they remain a creative accomplishment.

Hay was in politics all the later part of his life, ranking as one of the most brilliant Secretaries of State the country has ever had. He died in 1905.

JIM BLUDSO,

OF THE PRAIRIE BELLE

Wall, no! I can't tell whar he lives,
Becase he don't live, you see;
Leastways, he's got out of the habit
Of livin' like you and me.

Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven't heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?

He war'n't no saint,-them engineers
Is all pretty much alike,—
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill
And another one here, in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never flunked, and he never lied,-
I reckon he never knowed how.

And this was all the religion he had:

To treat his engine well; Never be passed on the river;

To mind the pilot's bell;

And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,
A thousand times he swore,

He'd hold her nozzle again the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.

All boats has their day on the Mississip,
And her day come at last,-

-

The Movastar was a better boat,

But the Belle she wouldn't be passed.
And so she came tearin' along that night-
The oldest craft on the line-

With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,
And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.

The fire bust out as she clar'd the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,

And quick as a flash she turned and made
For that willer-bank on the right.

Thar was runnin' and cussin', but Jim yelled out,

Over all the infernal roar,

"I'll hold her nozzle again the bank

Till the last galoot's ashore."

Through the hot, black breath of the burnin' boat

Jim Bludso's voice was heard,

And they all had trust in his cussedness,

And knowed he would keep his word.

And, sure's you're born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,—

And Bludso's ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He warn't no saint,-but at jedgement
I'd run my chance with Jim,
'Longside of some pious gentlemen

That wouldn't shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,-
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain't a goin' to be too hard
On a man that died for men.

BANTY TIM

(Remarks of Sergeant Tilmon Joy to the White Man's Committee of Spunky Point, Illinois)

I reckon I git your drift, gents,-
You 'low the boy sha'n't stay;
This is a white man's country;
You're Dimocrats, you say;

And whereas, and seein', and wherefore,
The times bein' all out o' j'int,

The nigger has got to mosey

From the limits o' Spunky P'int!

Le's reason the thing a minute:

I'm an old-fashioned Dimocrat too, Though I laid my politics out o' the way For to keep till the war was through.