SONNET BY H. PHELPS PUTNAM You flew the time when you were swift and clear, A subtle innocent, a blazing truth, Whose words shone bright when mine were sharp and sere, Great classic angel of my mazy youth. But now you walk, your ravished wings are furled; We both are mortal now, and each to each, Sharing the silly lessons of the world, Bear candid solace out of open speech. Or we discourse; and then the world grows pale The truth is dead-we killed it solemnly, TWO POEMS BY JEANNETTE MARKS FLOODED LAND What is this voice that cries through the door, Drenched to the knee I take your hand, What is this voice that cries through the door, RESEMBLANCES Brooding resemblances of marsh and sky, Woven with grey, harsh and dry It knows the reeds' cradle to the bird's breast. Memory become a frosted glow, What dreams for the wild heart shine? Night with the hills stark, and the first snow Blurring a wilderness of pine. CRETAN TEAR JAR BY JOSEPH AUSLANDER This little thing blown out of fluent glass, Of art remembers them. So let it be: Grief is all of loveliness: grief remains; The weeping girls go delicately down to dust; And there is only unearthly lustre that stains The resolute propinquity of rust; There is only the acrid smell of must And the wet darkness after a thousand rains. PITY THE GREAT BY MARY SINTON LEITCH Pity the great;—it is their doom to be The champions of lost causes. Though they seem Christ, Galileo, Socrates, Descartes- FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS BY WILLIAM A. DRAKE CRITICAL enthusiasm for a great writer of another nation is always gratifying; but when it persistently fastens upon the most debatable phases of his achievement, and leaves completely out of account the excellent services of the masters who made ready the way for him, it begins to smack of the cocksure superficiality of the newspaper reviewers. The recent vogue of Benedetto Croce is exemplary of this. I am not certain that the translated works of the Italian critic are popular successes in the bookseller's understanding of the term, but it is enough that they have excited among our literary critics an exceptional enthusiasm for the theories which they promulgate. The author of a score of the most illuminating works in literary criticism produced in our young century, Senator Croce is hardly known in this country at all except for his Breviario di estetica, which has become the textbook of an energetic and apparently deeply consequential fad. Croce, who is beyond a doubt the most significant critic in Italy today and the most learned savant since Carducci, I cannot say has so greatly impressed me by his singular philosophy of æsthetic. To me, he has done more to mystify Hegel than any writer since Hegel himself; and I fail most abjectly to follow his pretentious ratios and his paradoxical generalizations beyond the points of commonplace repetition and deliberate verbal impressiveness. It is easy to understand how the Italian mind, which is not analytical and is by its nature peculiarly accessible to metaphysical subtleties, should be engaged by this new doctrine of æsthetic, which is really not a doctrine at all; but it is difficult to understand how the Anglo-Saxon mind, which is historically positive and exacting, and which requires a definite basis for each theory it entertains, should for a moment be taken in by any such diffuse and illogical code of rhetorical abstractions. Croce's most legitimate and surest claim to present fame and future |