Meanwhile, "Black sheep! Black sheep!" we cry,

Safe in the inner fold;

And maybe they hear, and wonder why,
And marvel, out in the cold.

Oliver Herford

Oliver Herford was born in December, 1863, at Manchester, England. He studied art in London and at Julien's in Paris, turned to literature as a pastime and, about 1890, came to the United States, where he has lived ever since.

Herford, celebrated as a wit as well as a draughtsman and versifier, is the author of no less than twenty volumes of light verse, prose pasquinades and burlesques. His The Bashful Earthquake (1898), Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten (1904) and This Giddy Globe (1919) show Herford's delicate skill and his versatile dexterity. These volumes, like most of Herford's, are embellished by his own drawings, which are fully as graceful as the accompanying verses.

EARTH1

If this little world to-night

Suddenly should fall through space
In a hissing, headlong flight,

Shrivelling from off its face,

As it falls into the sun,

In an instant every trace

Of the little crawling things

Ants, philosophers, and lice,

1 Reprinted from The Bashful Earthquake by Oliver Herford. Copyright, 1898, by Charles Scribner's Sons.

Who can say but at the same

Instant from some planet far,

A child may watch us and exclaim:
"See the pretty shooting star!"

THE ELF AND THE DORMOUSE

Under a toadstool crept a wee Elf,
Out of the rain to shelter himself.

Under the toadstool, sound asleep,
Sat a big Dormouse all in a heap.

Trembled the wee Elf, frightened and yet
Fearing to fly away lest he get wet.

To the next shelter-maybe a mile!
Sudden the wee Elf smiled a wee smile.

Tugged till the toadstool toppled in two.
Holding it over him, gaily he flew.

Soon he was safe home, dry as could be.
Soon woke the Dormouse-" Good gracious me!

Where is my toadstool?" loud he lamented. -And that's how umbrellas first were invented.

Richard Hovey was born in 1864 at Normal, Illinois, and graduated from Dartmouth in 1885. After leaving college, he became, in rapid succession, a theologian, an actor, a journalist, a lecturer, a professor of English literature at Barnard, a poet and a dramatist.

His first volume, The Laurel: An Ode (1889), betrayed the overmusical influence of Lanier and gave promise of that extraordinary facility which often brought Hovey perilously close to the pit of mere technique. His exuberant virility found its outlet in the series of poems published in collaboration with Bliss Carman-the three volumes of Songs from Vagabondia (1894, 1896, 1900). Here he let himself go completely; nothing remained sober or static. His lines fling themselves across the page; dance with intoxicating abandon; shout with a wild irresponsibility; leap, laugh, carouse and carry off the reader in a gale of high spirits. The famous Stein Song is but an interlude in the midst of a far finer and even more rousing poem that, with its flavor of Whitman, begins:

I said in my heart, "I am sick of four walls and a ceiling. I have need of the sky.

I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling,
Lone and high,

And the slow clouds go by.

I will get me away to the waters that glass

The clouds as they pass. . . .”

Hovey's attitude to his art may be expressed in no better way than his own words concerning the poet: "It is not his mission," wrote Hovey in the Dartmouth Magazine, "to write elegant canzonettas for the delectation of the diletianti, but to comfort the sorrowful and hearten the despairing, to champion the oppressed and declare to humanity its inalienable rights, to lay open to the world the heart of man-all its heights and depths, all its glooms and glories, to reveal the beauty in things and breathe into his fellows a love of it." This almost too con

scious awareness of the poet's "mission" often marred Hovey's work; in responding to his program, he frequently overstressed his ringing enthusiasm, strained his own muscularity. But his power was as unflagging as his fraternal energy was persuasive. And in certain quieter moods the poet rose to new heights. The work on which he was engaged at the time of his death is significant; Launcelot and Guenevere: A Poem in Five Dramas is magnificent in its restrained vitality.

Although the varied lyrics in Songs from Vagabondia are the best known examples of Hovey, a more representative collection of his riper work may be found in Along the Trail (1898). This volume contains " Spring" and the stirring "Comrades" in full as well as the best of his vivid fragments. Hovey died, during his thirty-sixth year, in 1900.

AT THE CROSSROADS

You to the left and I to the right,
For the ways of men must sever-
And it well may be for a day and a night,
And it well may be forever.

But whether we meet or whether we part
(For our ways are past our knowing),
A pledge from the heart to its fellow heart
On the ways we all are going!

Here's luck!

For we know not where we are going.

Whether we win or whether we lose
With the hands that life is dealing,
It is not we nor the ways we choose
But the fall of the cards that's sealing.

There's a faté in love and a fate in fight,
And the best of us all go under—

And whether we're wrong or whether we're right,

We win, sometimes, to our wonder.

Here's luck!

That we may not yet go under!

With a steady swing and an open brow
We have tramped the ways together,

But we're clasping hands at the crossroads now
In the Fiend's own night for weather;

And whether we bleed or whether we smile

In the leagues that lie before us

The ways of life are many a mile
And the dark of Fate is o'er us.
Here's luck!

And a cheer for the dark before us!

You to the left and I to the right,
For the ways of men must sever,
And it well may be for a day and a night
And it well may be forever!

But whether we live or whether we die
(For the end is past our knowing),

Here's two frank hearts and the open sky,
Be a fair or an ill wind blowing!

Here's luck!

In the teeth of all winds blowing.