We gave a glamour to the task

That he encountered and saw through,
But little of us did he ask,

And little did we ever do.

And what appears if we review

The season when we railed and chaffed? It is the face of one who knew

That we were learning while we laughed.

The face that in our vision feels
Again the venom that we flung,
Transfigured to the world reveals
The vigilance to which we clung.
Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among
The mysteries that are untold,
The face we see was never young,
Nor could it ever have been old.

For he, to whom we have applied
Our shopman's test of age and worth,
Was elemental when he died,

As he was ancient at his birth:
The saddest among kings of earth,
Bowed with a galling crown, this man
Met rancor with a cryptic mirth,
Laconic-and Olympian.

The love, the grandeur, and the fame
Are bounded by the world alone;

The calm, the smouldering, and the flame
Of awful patience were his own:

With him they are forever flown
Past all our fond self-shadowings,
Wherewith we cumber the Unknown
As with inept Icarian wings.

For we were not as other men:
'Twas ours to soar and his to see.
But we are coming down again,
And we shall come down pleasantly;
Nor shall we longer disagree
On what it is to be sublime,

But flourish in our perigee

And have one Titan at a time.

RICHARD CORY*

WHENEVER Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich-yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.

George Sterling is the most distinguished living poet of our far West, though born in the East, at Sag Harbor, N. Y. He is a San Franciscan, and his name first became known in the East through Ambrose Bierce's praise of his volume A Wine of Wizardry, in an article that appeared in the Cosmopolitan Magazine in or about 1907. Sterling had already published The Testimony of the Suns, a volume of tremendously ambitious power, in which he strove to make planets and stellar systems vocal in a strange chant of creation and dissolution. A Wine of Wizardry was praised by Bierce as containing some of the most beautiful lines in all English verse, and certainly many of its phrases and pictures were marvelously skilful. It showed at once that here was a considerable craftsman in words, a poet with an unusually fine feeling for language and with high descriptive power. The poem lacked any particular emotional appeal; it was a brilliant experiment in technique. Just as a certain almost Miltonic grandeur was implicit in The Testimony of the Suns, so Keats and Coleridge seemed to brood in spirit over some of the passages of A Wine of Wizardry. Sterling continued to produce other volumes. His work became more subjective and increased in simplicity. He became more purely lyrical. He became more poignant. In my own opinion his art has come to its finest flower in some of his sonnets. I find a few of them not inferior to any sonnets in the language. That is why I have confined my selections here to what I consider the best of his sonnets.

Much of Sterling's work will remain largely traditional, lacking the tense power of his greater moments. Some of his lyrics are lovely, but many of them will fade. A few of his ballads are richly sonorous. His work always displays a reverence for poetry as a sacred art. He has also tried his hand at poetic drama and has written a number of commemorative poems. His earliest training was Roman Catholic but his philosophy as it evolved

became strongly agnostic, if not atheistic. There still remains in him, however, a certain ineradicable mysticism, even if it is only expressed in wistful speculation. His temperament is a strange mixture of rebellious pride, love of the open, of the stars, the wind, "the blind sea chanting in the sun," and also of the mysteriously exotic in literature. He has always been athletic, is a strong swimmer, has rejoiced in the blue skies and brilliant hills of California. He has also experienced much and suffered much. He is still giving us strong and skilful poetry and should continue to do so for many years. Already he has demonstrated the high value of his best work in the annals of American verse.

THE BLACK VULTURE *

ALOOF upon the day's immeasured dome,
He holds unshared the silence of the sky.
Far down his bleak, relentless eyes descry
The eagle's empire and the falcon's home-
Far down, the galleons of sunset roam;

His hazards on the sea of morning lie;
Serene, he hears the broken tempest sigh
Where cold sierras gleam like scattered foam.

And least of all he holds the human swarm-
Unwitting now that envious men prepare

To make their dream and its fulfillment one,
When, poised above the caldrons of the storm,
Their hearts, contemptuous of death, shall dare
His roads between the thunder and the sun.

*From Selected Poems of George Sterling. Copyright, 1923, by Henry Helt and Company.