lines that strangely anticipated the Imagists and the epigrammatic free verse that followed fifteen years later. Acidulous and biting, these almost telegraphic concisions were unappreciated in his day; Crane's elliptical verse has not yet received its due in an age which employs its very technique. But it was forty years before Emily Dickinson won her rightful audience. And the impending publication of the first uniform Complete Works indicates that Crane may be coming into his own. Besides his many novels, short stories and poems, Crane was writing, at the time of his death, descriptions of the world's great battles for Lippincott's Magazine; his droll Whilomville Stories for boys were appearing in Harper's Monthly, and he was beginning a series of similar stories for girls. It is more than probable that this feverish energy of production aggravated the illness that caused Crane's death. He reached his refuge in the Black Forest only to die at the journey's end, June 5, 1900. I SAW A MAN I saw a man pursuing the horizon; I was disturbed at this; I accosted the man. "You lie," he cried, And ran on. THE WAYFARER The wayfarer, Perceiving the pathway to truth, "I see that no one has passed here Later he saw that each weed Was a singular knife. "Well," he mumbled at last, "Doubtless there are other roads." HYMN A slant of sun on dull brown walls, Toward God a mighty hymn, The unknown appeals of brutes, The chanting of flowers, The screams of cut trees, The senseless babble of hens and wise menA cluttered incoherency that says to the stars: "O God, save us!" THE BLADES OF GRASS In Heaven, Some little blades of grass Stood before God. "What did you do?" Then all save one of the little blades Began eagerly to relate The merits of their lives. This one stayed a small way behind, Ashamed. Presently, God said, "And what did you do?" The little blade answered, "Oh, my Lord, For, if I did good deeds, Then God, in all his splendor, Arose from his throne. "Oh, best little blade of grass!" he said. THE HEART In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, And ate of it. I said, "Is it good, friend?" "It is bitter-bitter," he answered; "Because it is bitter, "And because it is my heart." Edwin Ford Piper Edwin Ford Piper was born at Auburn, Nebraska, February 8, 1871, and literally grew up in the saddle. In 1893 he entered the University of Nebraska, from which he received an A.B. in 1897 and an A.M. in 1900. He studied at Harvard (1903-4), was one of the editors of The Kiote (a magazine published from 1898 to 1902 in Lincoln, Nebraska), and, since 1905, has been an instructor of English at the State University of Iowa. Piper's Barbed Wire and Other Poems (1918) is saturated with the color of his environment. His later poems are still more vivid and racy. "Sweetgrass Range" (with its self-acknowledged debt to Burns' "Rattlin' Roarin' Willie") and "Bindlestiff" are fresh evidences of this author's creative interest in ballads and folk-lore. BINDLESTIFF Oh, the lives of men, lives of men, But there's you, and me, and Bindlestiff- At dawn the hedges and the wheel-ruts ran Then a man's baritone broke roughly in: I've gnawed my crust of mouldy bread, Slanting rain chills my bones, Sun bakes my skin; Rocky road for my limping feet, Door where I can't go in. Above the hedgerow floated filmy smoke I used to burn the mules with the whip But the boss was a crook and he docked my pay- I used to live in a six by nine, The mesh of leafy branches rustled loud, In stained and broken coat, with untrimmed hedge Sometimes they shut you up in jail— I hope the fellows built them jails But up above, you can sleep outdoors- You never have to saw no wood, The tones came mellower, as unevenly Good-bye, farewell to Omaha, K. C., and Denver, too; Bindlestiff topped a hillock, against the sky |