IDENTITY*

SOMEWHERE-in desolate wind-swept space-
In Twilight-land-in No-man's-land-
Two hurrying Shapes met face to face,
And bade each other stand.

"And who are you?" cried one a-gape,
Shuddering in the gloaming light.
"I know not," said the second Shape,
"I only died last night!"

HEREDITY

A SOLDIER of the Cromwell stamp,
With sword and psalm-book by his side,
At home alike in church and camp:
Austere he lived, and smileless died.

But she, a creature soft and fine

From Spain, some say, some say from France;
Within her veins leapt blood like wine-
She led her Roundhead lord a dance!

In Grantham church they lie asleep;
Just where, the verger may not know.

Strange that two hundred years should keep

The old ancestral fires aglow!

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

In me these two have met again;
To each my nature owes a part:
To one, the cool and reasoning brain;
To one, the quick, unreasoning heart.

ACT V

(Midnight)

FIRST, two white arms that held him very close,
And ever closer as he drew him back
Reluctantly, the unbound golden hair
A thousand delicate fibres reaching out
Still to detain him; then some twenty steps
Of iron staircase winding round and down,
And ending in a narrow gallery hung
With Gobelin tapestries-Andromeda
Rescued by Perseus, and the sleek Diana
With her nymphs bathing; at the farther end
A door that gave upon a starlit grove
Of citron and dwarf cypress; then a path

As bleached as moonlight, with the shadow of leaves
Stamped black upon it; next a vine-clad length
Of solid masonry; and last of all

A gothic archway packed with night, and then—
A sudden gleaming dagger through his heart.

FREDERICKSBURG

THE increasing moonlight drifts across my bed,
And on the churchyard by the road, I know
It falls as white and noiselessly as snow.
'Twas such a night two weary summers fled;
The stars, as now, were waning overhead.
Listen! Again the shrill-lipped bugles blow
Where the swift currents of the river flow
Past Fredericksburg; far off the heavens are red
With sudden conflagration; on yon height,
Linstock in hand, the gunners hold their breath;
A signal rocket pierces the dense night,

Flings its spent stars upon the town beneath:
Hark! the artillery massing on the right,

Hark! the black squadrons wheeling down to Death!

William Dean Howells (1837-1921)

Howells is, of course, one of the most eminent of American novelists. He came to the East from Ohio. In 1860 he published Poems of Two Friends with John Piatt. He was United States Consul at Venice from 1861 to 1865. His Venetian Life, published shortly after, began his reputation. A collection of his Poems followed in 1867. He was long associated with Harper's Monthly Magazine, holding an honorary editorial position there until the Idate of his death.

Howells published in all a great many novels, books of essays; much autobiographical and editorial work. Other volumes of his poems appeared in 1886 and 1895. He has been called, until recently, "The Dean of American Letters." His was the groundwork laid for the modern American realistic novel. He was primarily a novelist and not a poet, but his poetry has never met with the appreciation in America that, it seems to me, is its due. Howells' strength as a poet lies in the fact that he always seems driven to expression by the recognized import of a definite idea, not by mere vague emotionalism. He seeks to ape no one. The deep sympathy of the man and the strong humanity can be felt in his Judgment Day, the precision of his artistry in In Earliest Spring. He never impressed his own personality quite strongly enough upon his poetry, as he as certainly did upon his novels, but his poems contain both nobility and beauty.

JUDGMENT DAY*

BEFORE Him weltered like a shoreless sea
The souls of them that had not sought to be,
With all their guilt upon them, and they cried,

They that had sinned from hate and lust and pride,

From Stops of Various Quills, by William Dean Howells, New York, Harper & Brothers.

"Thou that didst make us what we might become,
Judge us!" The Judge of all the earth was dumb;
But high above them, in His sovereign place,
He lifted up the pity of His face.

FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION*

INNOCENT Spirits, bright, immaculate ghosts!
Why throng your heavenly hosts,

As eager for their birth

In this sad home of death, this sorrow-haunted earth?

Beware! Beware! Content you where you are,

And shun this evil star,

Where we who are doomed to die

Have our brief being, and pass, we know not where

or why.

We have not to consent or to refuse;

It is not ours to choose:

We come because we must,

We know not by what law, if unjust or if just.

The doom is on us, as it is on you,

That nothing can undo;

And all in vain you warn:

As your fate is to die, our fate is to be born.

From Stops of Various Quills, by William Dean Howells, New York, Harper & Brothers.