But God was an artist from the first,
And knew what he was about;

While over his shoulder sneered these two,
And advised him to rub it out.

They prophesied ruin ere man was made;
"Such folly must surely fail!"

And when he was done, "Do you think, my Lord,
He's better without a tail?"

And still in the honest working world,

With posture and hint and smirk,

These sons of the devil are standing by
While man does all the work.

They balk endeavor and baffle reform,
In the sacred name of law;

And over the quavering voice of Hem
Is the droning voice of Haw.

DAISIES

Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune
I saw the white daisies go down to the sea,
A host in the sunshine, an army in June,
The people God sends us to set our hearts free.

The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell,
The orioles whistled them out of the wood;
And all of their singing was, "Earth, it is well!"
And all of their dancing was, "Life, thou art good!"

Richard Burton

Richard (Eugene) Burton was born in Hartford, Connecticut, March 14, 1861. He has taught English at various colleges and universities since 1888, and has been head of the English depart

ment of the University of Minnesota since 1906. His first book, Dumb in June (1895), is, in many ways, his best. It contains a buoyant lyricism, a more conscious use of the strain developed in Carman and Hovey's Songs from Vagabondia—a mood which he has never surpassed. Much of his other verse is far less distinctive, being what might be called "anonymous poetry"; a poetry that has, in spite of certain excellent qualities, little trace of the individual and practically no stamp of personality or place. The succeeding Lyrics of Brotherhood (1899) has a wider vision if a more limited music; several of the poems in this collection reflect the hungers, dreams and unsung melodies of the dumb and defeated multitudes. From the Book of Life (1909) has scarcely as much power and less poetry.

Besides his verse, Burton has written several books of essays, a life of Whittier and various volumes on the drama.

BLACK SHEEP

From their folded mates they wander far,
Their ways seem harsh and wild;
They follow the beck of a baleful star,
Their paths are dream-beguiled.

Yet haply they sought but a wider range,
Some loftier mountain-slope,

And little they recked of the country strange
Beyond the gates of hope.

And haply a bell with a luring call
Summoned their feet to tread

Midst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfall
And the lurking snare are spread.

Maybe, in spite of their tameless days

Of outcast liberty,

They're sick at heart for the homely ways.

Where their gathered brothers be.

And oft at night, when the plains fall dark
And the hills loom large and dim,
For the Shepherd's voice they mutely hark,
And their souls go out to him.

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.

George Santayana

George Santayana was born in Madrid, Spain, December 16, 1863, came to the United States at the age of nine, and was educated at Harvard, where later he became instructor of philosophy the same year he received his Ph.D. This was in 1889. From 1889 to 1912, he remained at Harvard, becoming not merely one of the most noted professors in the history of the University, but one of the most widely appreciated minds in America. In 1914, he went abroad and ever since then he has been living in France and England.

Santayana's first work was in verse, Sonnets and Poems (1894). It is a wise seriousness which is here proclaimed, although the idiom is as traditional as the figures are orthodox. The Sense of Beauty (1896), and The Life of Reason (1905), received far more attention than Santayana's earlier verse. Having in the interval achieved fame as a philosopher, it is with an almost apologetic air that Santayana prefaces his collected Poems which, after a process of revision, appeared in 1923. "Of impassioned tenderness or Dionysiac frenzy I have nothing, nor even of that magic and pregnancy of phrase-really the creation of a fresh idiom-which marks the high lights of poetry. Even if my temperament had been naturally warmer, the fact that the English language (and I can write no other with assurance) was not my mother-tongue would of itself preclude any inspired use of it on my part; its roots do not quite reach to my centre. I never drank in in childhood the homely cadences and ditties which in pure spontaneous poetry set the essential key."

Yet, as Santayana himself maintains later on, the thoughts which prompted his verses could not have been transcribed in any other form. If the prosody is worn somewhat thin, it is because the poet-philosopher chooses the classic mold in the belief that the innate freedom of poets to hazard new forms does not abolish the freedom to attempt the old ones. The moralizing is personal, even the rhetoric is justified. "Here is the hand of an apprentice, but of an apprentice in a great school."

THE RUSTIC AT THE PLAY

Our youth is like a rustic at the play
That cries aloud in simple-hearted fear,
Curses the villain, shudders at the fray,
And weeps before the maiden's wreathed bier.
Yet once familiar with the changeful show,
He starts no longer at a brandished knife,
But, his heart chastened at the sight of woe,
Ponders the mirrored sorrows of his life.
So tutored too, I watch the moving art
Of all this magic and impassioned pain
That tells the story of the human heart
In a false instance, such as poets feign;
I smile, and keep within the parchment furled
That prompts the passions of this strutting world.

"O WORLD, THOU CHOOSEST NOT THE BETTER PART"

O world, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.

Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

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, becoming a citizen, he has lived ever since. Herford, celebrated as a wit as well as 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.

EARTH 1

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,
Cattle, cockroaches, and kings,

Beggars, millionaires, and mice,

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