The king sat bowed beneath his crown,
Propping his face with listless hand;
Watching the hour-glass sifting down
Too slow its shining sand.

"Poor man, what wouldst thou have of me?"
The beggar turned, and pitying,
Replied, like one in dream, "Of thee,
Nothing. I want the king."

Uprose the king, and from his head Shook off the crown, and threw it by. "O man! thou must have known," he said. "A greater king than I."

Through all the gates, unquestioned then,
Went king and beggar hand in hand.
Whispered the king, "Shall I know when
Before his throne I stand?"

The beggar laughed. Free winds in haste
Were wiping from the king's hot brow
The crimson lines the crown had traced.
"This is his presence now."

At the king's gate, the crafty noon
Unwove its yellow nets of sun;

Out of their sleep in terror soon
The guards waked one by one.

"Ho here! Ho there! Has no man seen The king?" The cry ran to and fro;

Beggar and king, they laughed, I ween,
The laugh that free men know.

On the king's gate the moss grew gray;
The king came not. They called him dead;
And made his eldest son one day

Slave in his father's stead.

POPPIES IN THE WHEAT *

ALONG Ancona's hills the shimmering heat,
A tropic tide of air, with ebb and flow
Bathes all the fields of wheat until they glow
Like flashing seas of green, which toss and beat
Around the vines. The poppies lithe and fleet
Seem running, fiery torchmen, to and fro

To mark the shore. The farmer does not know
That they are there. He walks with heavy feet,
Counting the bread and wine by autumn's gain,
But I, I smile to think that days remain

Perhaps to me in which, though bread be sweet
No more, and red wine warm my blood in vain,
I shall be glad remembering how the fleet,
Lithe poppies ran like torchmen with the wheat.

Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908)

Stedman combined poetry with banking and was for many years an active member of the Stock Exchange in Wall Street. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, entered Yale at the age of fifteen, took first prize for his poem "Westminster Abbey," and was suspended at the end of his sophomore year. After having won public recognition over twenty years later he was restored to his class and made an M.A. He edited the Norwich Tribune and Winsted Herald, 1852-55. While on the New York Tribune he first printed "Osawatomie Brown." He joined the staff of the New York World in 1860, and was its war correspondent during the Civil War. He also served in the Attorney-General's office at Washington. In 1864 he helped construct and finance the first section of the first Pacific railroad. He entered Wall Street in 1864, desiring to gain a livelihood for literary work. From 1860 on he published about a dozen volumes of poetry, anthologies, lectures, and so on. He held his seat in the Stock Exchange until 1900. His Complete Poems appeared in 1908. He had become President of the American Copyright League in 1891.

Stedman's "Pan in Wall Street" deals with a locale he knew well. "John Brown of Osawatomie," written in 1859, expresses Stedman's sturdier side. Later criticism of the real John Brown shows that historic American in less heroic aspects. However, Stedman's poem was sincerely written and contains real feeling and fire. Stedman did a great service to poetry in the compilation of his "American" and "Victorian" anthologies, and was ever a firm friend of all poets in this country. In poetry his real life was lived.

Beside the poems mentioned above, "Kearney at Seven Pines" is a dashing poem of the Civil War; the rest of Stedman's poetry is fairly negligible, though much of it is written with grace and skill. Stedman knew and corresponded with all the best poets of his time, and his position as an anthologist in America is equivalent to that of Francis Turner Palgrave in England.

PAN IN WALL STREET *

JUST where the Treasury's marble front
Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations;
Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont

To throng for trade and last quotations;
Where, hour by hour, the rates of gold
Outrival, in the ears of people,
The quarter-chimes, serenely tolled
From Trinity's undaunted steeple,-

Even there I heard a strange, wild strain
Sound high above the modern clamor,
Above the cries of greed and gain,

The curbstone war, the auction's hammer;
And swift, on Music's misty ways,

It led, from all this strife for millions,

To ancient, sweet-do-nothing days.
Among the kirtle-robed Sicilians.

And as it stilled the multitude,

And yet more joyous rose, and shriller,
I saw the minstrel, where he stood
At ease against a Doric pillar:
One hand a droning organ played,

The other held a Pan's-pipe (fashioned
Like those of old) to lips that made

The reeds give out that strain impassioned.

The poems by Edmund Clarence Stedman are used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers.

'T was Pan himself had wandered here A-strolling through this sordid city, And piping to the civic ear

The prelude of some pastoral ditty! The demigod had crossed the seas,—

From haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr, And Syracusan times,-to these

Far shores and twenty centuries later.

A ragged cap was on his head;

But-hidden thus-there was no doubting That, all with crispy locks o'erspread,

His gnarled horns were somewhere sprouting; His club-feet, cased in rusty shoes,

Were crossed, as on some frieze you see them, And trousers, patched of divers hues,

Concealed his crooked shanks beneath them.

He filled the quivering reeds with sound,
And o'er his mouth their changes shifted,
And with his goat's-eyes looked around
Where'er the passing current drifted;
And soon, as on Trinacrian hills

The nymphs and herdsmen ran to hear him, Even now the tradesmen from their tills, With clerks and porters, crowded near him.

The bulls and bears together drew

From Jauncey Court and New Street Alley, As erst, if pastorals be true,

Came beasts from every wooded valley,