"Oh, glory be to me!" cries he,
And to my noble noose!
Oh, stranger, tell my pards below
I took a rampin' dream in tow,
And if I never lay him low,

I'll never turn him loose!"

THE COYOTE 1

Trailing the last gleam after,
In the valleys emptied of light,
Ripples a whimsical laughter

Under the wings of the night,
Mocking the faded west airily,
Meeting the little bats merrily,
Over the mesas it shrills

To the red moon on the hills.

Mournfully rising and waning,
Far through the moon-silvered land
Wails a weird voice of complaining
Over the thorns and the sand.
Out of blue silences eerily,

On to the black mountains wearily,
Till the dim desert is crossed,

Wanders the cry, and is lost.

1 From Grass-Grown Trails by Badger Clark. Copyright, 1917. Richard G. Badger, Publisher.

Here by the fire's ruddy streamers,
Tired with our hopes and our fears,
We inarticulate dreamers

Hark to the song of our years.
Up to the brooding divinity
Far in that sparkling infinity

Cry our despair and delight,

Voice of the Western night!

Marguerite Wilkinson

Marguerite Ogden Bigelow was born at Halifax, Nova Scotia, November 15, 1883. She attended Northwestern University and married James G. Wilkinson in 1909.

In Vivid Gardens (1911) is a mixture of original moods and derivative manners. The later Bluestone (1920) is a much riper collection; a book of lyrics in which the author has made many experiments in the combination of rhythmical tunes and verbal music.

Mrs. Wilkinson is also the author of New Voices (1919), a series of essays on contemporary verse, reinforced with liberal quotations from both English and American poets.

BEFORE DAWN IN THE WOODS
Upon our eyelids, dear, the dew will lie,
And on the roughened meshes of our hair,
While little feet make bold to scurry by

And half-notes shrilly cut the quickened air.
Our clean, hard bodies, on the clean, hard ground
Will vaguely feel that they are full of power,
And they will stir, and stretch, and look around,
Loving the early, chill, half-lighted hour.

Loving the voices in the shadowed trees,

Loving the feet that stir the blossoming grass-
Oh, always we have known such things as these,
And knowing, can we love and let them pass?

Harry Kemp

Harry (Hibbard) Kemp, known as "the tramp-poet," was born at Youngstown, Ohio, December 15, 1883. He came East at the age of twelve, left school to enter a factory, but returned to high school to study English.

A globe-trotter by nature, he went to sea before finishing his high school course. He shipped first to Australia, then to China, from China to California, from California to the University of Kansas. After a few months in London in 1909 (he crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway) he returned to New York City, where he has lived ever since, founding his own theater in which he is actor, stage-manager, playwright and chorus.

Kemp's first book was a play, Judas (1910), a reversion of the biblical figure along the lines of Paul Heyse's Mary of Magdala. His first collection of poems, The Cry of Youth (1914), like the subsequent volume, The Passing God (1919), is full of every kind of poetry except the kind one might imagine Kemp would write. Instead of crude and boisterous verse, here is a precise and almost over-polished poetry. Kemp has, strangely enough, taken the classic formalists for his models-one can even detect the whispers of Pope and Dryden in his lines.

Chanteys and Ballads (1920) is riper and more representative. The notes are more varied, the sense of personality is more pronounced.

STREET LAMPS

Softly they take their being, one by one,
From the lamp-lighter's hand, after the sun

Has dropped to dusk... like little flowers they bloom
Set in long rows amid the growing gloom.

Who he who lights them is, I do not know,
Except that, every eve, with footfall slow
And regular, he passes by my room
And sets his gusty flowers of light a-bloom.

A PHANTASY OF HEAVEN

Perhaps he plays with cherubs now,
Those little, golden boys of God,
Bending, with them, some silver bough,
The while a seraph, head a-nod,

Slumbers on guard; how they will run
And shout, if he should wake too soon,—
As fruit more golden than the sun

And riper than the full-grown moon,

Conglobed in clusters, weighs them down,
Like Atlas heaped with starry signs;
And, if they're tripped, heel over crown,
By hidden coils of mighty vines,-

Perhaps the seraph, swift to pounce,

Will hale them, vexed, to God-and He
Will only laugh, remembering, once
He was a boy in Galilee!

Max Eastman

Max Eastman was born at Canandaigua, New York, January 4, 1883. Both his father and mother had been Congregationalist preachers, so it was natural that the son should turn from scholasticism to a definitely social expression. Eastman had received his A.B. at Williams in 1905; from 1907 to 1911 he had been Associate in Philosophy at Columbia University. But in the latter part of 1911, he devoted all his time to writing, studying the vast problems of economic inequality and voicing the protests of the dumb millions in a style that was all the firmer for being philosophic. In 1913, he became editor of The Masses which, in 1917, became The Liberator.

Child of the Amazons (1913) reveals the quiet lover of beauty as well as the fiery hater of injustice. The best of these poems, with many new ones, were incorporated in Colors of Life (1918). This volume is a far richer collection; a record of glowing hours, steadily burning truths.

Besides Eastman's poems and essays, he has written one of the most clarifying—and most readable-studies of the period. Enjoyment of Poetry (1913) is invaluable as a new kind of text-book, the chief purpose of which, in the words of its preface, is to increase enjoyment. Eliminating the usual academic and literary classifications, Eastman accomplishes his object, which is to show that the poetic in everyday perception and conversation should not be separated from the poetic in literature.