Youth that would flow to waste Pausing in pool-green valleysAnd Passion that lasted not Surviving the voiceless Tomb!

Sarah N. Cleghorn (1876

Miss Cleghorn was born in Virginia, but early came north and was educated in Manchester, Vermont. She then spent a year at Radcliffe, and returned to Manchester, where she has lived ever since, quite out of the modern world and yet intensely of it through her vivid social conscience and her strong sympathy with the unpopular causes of the day. Her sympathies were strongly socialistic. Portraits and Protests, 1917, contains poetry both of calm and quiet charm and of spirited rebellion against the social injustices of the day. More recently Miss Cleghorn has come to New York in an editorial capacity on a new magazine which is striving in every sane and sound way for social and industrial betterment.

The poem here given illustrates perhaps Miss Cleghorn's rarest gift, that of describing with wistful and exquisite charm the scenery and country characters of her native state. The religious fervor of New England ancestors is in Miss Cleghorn's blood and a traditional courtesy and scrupulous honesty mingles with a perhaps more modern passion for social justice.

EMILIA *

HALFWAY up the Hemlock valley turnpike,
In the bend of Silver Water's arm,
Where the deer come trooping down at even,
Drink the cowslip pool, and fear no harm,
Dwells Emilia,

Flower of the fields of Camlet Farm.

*From Portraits and Protests, by Sarah N. Cleghorn.

by Henry Holt and Company.

Copyright, 1917, .

Sitting sewing by the western window
As the too brief mountain sunshine flies,
Hast thou seen a slender-shouldered figure
With a chestnut braid, Minerva-wise,
Round her temples,

Shadowing her gray, enchanted eyes?

When the freshets flood the Silver Water,
When the swallow flying northward braves
Sleeting rains that sweep the birchen foothills
Where the windflowers' pale plantation waves-
(Fairy gardens

Springing from the dead leaves in their graves),— Falls forgotten, then, Emilia's needle;

Ancient ballads, fleeting through her brain, Sing the cuckoo and the English primrose, Outdoors calling with a quaint refrain; And a rainbow

Seems to brighten through the gusty rain.

Forth she goes, in some old dress and faded,
Fearless of the showery shifting wind;
Kilted are her skirts to clear the mosses,
And her bright braids in a 'kerchief pinned,
Younger sister

Of the damsel-errant Rosalind.

While she helps to serve the harvest supper
In the lantern-lighted village hall,
Moonlight rises on the burning woodland,
Echoes dwindle from the distant Fall.
Hark, Emilia!

In her ear the airy voices call.

Hidden papers in the dusty garret,

Where her few and secret poems lie,— Thither flies her heart to join her treasure, While she serves, with absent-musing eye, Mighty tankards

Foaming cider in the glasses high.

"Would she mingle with her young companions!"
Vainly do her aunts and uncles say;
Ever, from the village sports and dances,
Early missed, Emilia slips away.

Whither vanished?

With what unimagined mates to play?

Did they seek her, wandering by the water,
They should find her comrades shy and strange:
Queens and princesses, and saints and fairies,
Dimly moving in a cloud of change:-
Desdemona;

Mariana of the Moated Grange.

Up this valley to the fair and market

When young farmers from the southward ride, Oft they linger at a sound of chanting In the meadows by the turnpike side; Long they listen,

Deep in fancies of a fairy bride.

Mr. Leonard was born in New Jersey. He received a postgraduate degree from Harvard in 1899 and then studied abroad at Göttingen and Bonn. He remained several years in Europe and has been Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin since 1906.

In 1912 he published The Vaunt of Man. He has also published Greek and Latin translations and paraphrases from Aesop's fables. The Vaunt of Man was vigorously rebel in its utterance, though Mr. Leonard's technique is ordinarily somewhat academic.

In 1920 he published "The Lynching Bee," a poem of remarkable ironic power, painting a terrible picture of a negro lynching. "The Quaker Meeting-House" appeared in the New York Nation in February, 1922. It represents Mr. Leonard's most recent work. His is a force to be reckoned with in modern America poetry.

THE QUAKER MEETING-HOUSE *

I

BEYOND the corn-rows from our Barracks stood
Along the elm-arched turnpike, out of town,
The Quaker Meeting-House, likewise of wood,
With windows burning when the sun went down;
Sided with shingles, roofed like plain big A,
With neither bell-tower, cross, nor apse.
And whitest when the moon was off that way,
Beyond the rustling corn-rows, after taps. . . .

* Reprinted by permission of The Nation.