PREPAREDNESS

For all your days prepare,

And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear-
When you are the hammer, strike.

LINCOLN, THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE 1

When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour
Greatening and darkening as it hurried on,
She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down
To make a man to meet the mortal need.
She took the tried clay of the common road-
Clay warm yet with the genial heat of earth,
Dasht through it all a strain of prophecy;
Tempered the heap with thrill of human tears;
Then mixt a laughter with the serious stuff.
Into the shape she breathed a flame to light
That tender, tragic, ever-changing face;
And laid on him a sense of the Mystic Powers,
Moving-all husht-behind the mortal veil.
Here was a man to hold against the world,
A man to match the mountains and the sea.

The color of the ground was in him, the red earth; The smack and tang of elemental things:

The rectitude and patience of the cliff;

The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves;
The friendly welcome of the wayside well;
The courage of the bird that dares the sea;
The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn;
The pity of the snow that hides all scars;
The secrecy of streams that make their way

1 See pages 147, 158, 279, 293, 298, 400.

Under the mountain to the rifted rock;
The tolerance and equity of light

That gives as freely to the shrinking flower
As to the great oak flaring to the wind-
To the grave's low hill as to the Matterhorn
That shoulders out the sky. Sprung from the West,
He drank the valorous youth of a new world.
The strength of virgin forests braced his mind,
The hush of spacious prairies stilled his soul.
His words were oaks in acorns; and his thoughts
Were roots that firmly gript the granite truth.

Up from log cabin to the Capitol,

One fire was on his spirit, one resolve-
To send the keen ax to the root of wrong,
Clearing a free way for the feet of God,
The eyes of conscience testing every stroke,
To make his deed the measure of a man.
He built the rail-pile as he built the State,
Pouring his splendid strength through every blow:
The grip that swung the ax in Illinois
Was on the pen that set a people free.

So came the Captain with the mighty heart;
And when the judgment thunders split the house,
Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest,
He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again
The rafters of the Home. He held his place-
Held the long purpose like a growing tree-
Held on through blame and faltered not at praise.
And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

Charles Erskine Scott Wood was born at Erie, Pennsylvania, February 20, 1852, educated at the United States Military Academy (1874) and Columbia, where he received the degrees of Ph.B. and LL.B. in 1883. Wood served in the United States Army for almost ten years, acting as lieutenant in various campaigns against the Indians during 1877-8. He was admitted to the bar in 1884, practised at Portland, Oregon, and retired in 1919.

In 1901 he published A Book of Tales, Being Myths of the North American Indians. In 1904, his symbolic A Masque of Love appeared. His finest work, however, is The Poet in the Desert (1915), a sonorous pageant of protest from which the first two quoted excerpts are taken. The volume itself is one long poem, a rhapsodic dialogue between Truth and a poet: the central theme might be termed the manhood of humanity, and about this leading motif Wood has woven a set of graphic variations. A disgust of tyranny, a challenge to injustice, a celebration of bastards-these may be the motive power prompting the poet; what results, however, has not merely the ring of passion but is a controlled assembling of sharply drawn pictures.

In 1918 a limited number of privately printed copies of Maia appeared. Maia is a sonnet sequence of the seasons with numerous interjections by the author and a few interpolations by Sara Bard Field, to whom is credited the form of the volume. This sequence, although not Wood's most memorable work, is a complete answer to those who claimed that most writers of free verse, and Wood in particular, could not successfully undertake the strict patterns. The third quotation in the following group is an added rebuttal to the old charge; it is one of Wood's most recent verses and has not yet appeared in any of his volumes.

SUNRISE

(From "The Poet in the Desert")

The lean coyote, prowler of the night,

Slips to his rocky fastnesses.

Jack-rabbits noiselessly shuttle among the sage-brush,

And, from the castellated cliffs,

Rock-ravens launch their proud black sails upon the day.

The wild horses troop back to their pastures.

The poplar-trees watch beside the irrigation-ditches.

Orioles, whose nests sway in the cotton-wood trees by the ditch-side, begin to twitter.

All shy things, breathless, watch

The thin white skirts of dawn,

The dancer of the sky,

Who trips daintily down the mountain-side

Emptying her crystal chalice. . .

And a red-bird, dipped in sunrise, cracks from a poplar's

top

His exultant whip above a silver world.

THE DESERT

She is a nun, withdrawing behind her veil;
Grey, mysterious, meditative, unapproachable.
Her body is tawny with the eagerness of the Sun
And her eyes are pools which shine in deep canyons.
She is a beautiful swart woman

With opals at her throat,

Rubies at her wrists

And topaz about her ankles.

Her breasts are like the evening and the day stars.

She sits upon her throne of light, proud and silent,
Indifferent to wooers.

The Sun is her servitor, the stars her attendants,
Running before her.

She sings a song unto her own ears,

Solitary but sufficient:

The song of her being.

She is a naked dancer, dancing upon

A pavement of porphyry and pearl,
Dazzling, so that the eyes must be shaded.
She wears the stars upon her bosom

And braids her hair with the constellations.

FIRST SNOW

The cows are bawling in the mountains.
The snowflakes fall.

They are leaving the pools and pebbled fountains;
Troubled, they bawl.

They are winding down the mountain's shoulders
Through the open pines,

Through wild rose thickets and the granite boulders
In broken lines.

Each calf trots close beside its mother

And so they go,

Bawling and calling to one another
About the snow.

Irwin Russell

Irwin Russell was born June 3, 1853, at Port Gibson, Mississippi, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar. His restless nature and wayward disposition drove him from one place to another, from dissipation to dissipation, from a not too rugged health to an utter breakdown. In July, 1879, he was forced to leave New York, working his way down to New Orleans on a coast steamer, trying to rehabilitate himself as reporter on the New Orleans Picayune. But illness pursued him and the following December Russell died, cut off, in the midst of his promise, before he had reached his twenty-seventh year.

Although Russell did not take his poetry seriously and though the bulk of it is small, its influence has been large. Thomas Nelson Page and Poel Chandler Harris have acknowledged their indebtedness to him; the creator of Uncle Remus writing, "Irwin Russell was among the first-if not the very first-of Southern writers to appreciate the literary possibilities of the negro character." He entered their life, appreciated their fresh turns of thought, saw things with that peculiar mixture of reverence and unconscious humor that is so integral a part of negro songs and spirituals. "Blessing the Dance" and "De Fust Banjo" (from Russell's