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I SAW A THOUGHT

BY VIRGINIA MOORE

I

I shall not fear the face of God,
Volcanic though it be,

And most magnificently odd;

I shall but lean against a star

And grasp at rails where meteors are,

Being a little overwrought

But not from God, nor hell, nor heaven,

For what are these to me riven

By the sight of one man's thought?

II

I saw a thought rise in a man
And spill out through his eyes,
I saw the spring where it began,
The tributaries where it ran,
The rocks it ate, the rills it drank,
Before its own imperative size
Had burst a hard cerebral bank
Into a mouth, grown wise.

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Song and glances and harps astrum

And we turned red and mad and whirled

Our swords and levelled

Our lances out across the world.

And shining splendid Launcelots

Went riding out of Camelots.

Praise to God

For cruel and white beauty!

That made our days of living

Great pearls of price

To be thrown and scattered in thorns and mold.

The Mother of the Snows,

Whose Son was God,

Lives her everlasting death

And dies her everlasting life,

And she is frail and white and very fair.

Men have loved the thorns within her hair

They have turned their backs upon

The day,

And said to sunshine,

"Go thy way."

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And the children of their brains,

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Joy, peace, and ease,

And the children of their loins

Who might have climbed their knees

They have left unborn

For the cruelest loveliness

And the Rose of bitterest thorn,

For the Kiss that scars and sears,

And walked the way of Francis and of tears.

Glory and praise

To the cruel beauty that has taught us

To tread thorns,

To the women who have taught us

To wear crowns!

They have made the midnight blossom
Morning stars;

They have reared us temples, towers,

Faith, and wars.

They have given us oath and hymn,
Have winged us like the cherubim;
Out of clay our feet had trod

They have shaped and fashioned for us
Everlasting, everlasting God.

MY BABIES ASLEEP

BY ROBERT P. TRISTRAM COFFIN

April Patience sleeps like dew

Or opal clouds the moon comes through,
The little moonlit clouds that rest
Like down upon an angel's breast.
She is first primrose petals,

All gentle, tender things, and blue
Morning glories,

Cricket songs, roses damp and new.
She sleeps with all the wistfulness
That mothers have when they caress.

July Glory sleeps like dawn

Fiercely eastern hills upon;

Her hands are gripped in dreamful zest,
Proud passions on her lids lie pressed;
Each separate curl is twisted

Into a flaming phoenix' nest

Tightly and hotly;

Albrecht Dürer might have etched them.

She is all spices, Troy's old stress,

And Helen's terrific tenderness.

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GERHART HAUPTMANN

BY BRIAN W. DOWNS

I

THE practice of dividing literary history into periods leads to abuse; it does, however, seem to have a justification in fact. Very rarely do we find a solitary great man rising above the dead level of his fellows like the Peak of Teneriffe from the ocean; geniuses more generally stand near together in time, and, even when one o'ertops them all, he is some Mont Blanc with Monte Rosa and other giants not far off and smaller eminences clustered round. The corollary to this has been less frequently remarked on. Every history embraces periods when the energies of men lie reposing and the movements of the day derive their impulse from activities of years gone past. No new leaders appear and the old content themselves with a repetition of former successes. As such periods in English literature we can designate the dozen years or so which lie between The Dunciad and the emergence of Samuel Richardson and, almost exactly one hundred years later, the interval from the death of Byron and the breakdown of Scott to the rise to fame of Tennyson, Browning and Dickens. It is not improbable that we, at the present day, after the lapse of yet another century are living in another such fallow time; but that it is impossible to discern accurately at so close a range, and the last of its kind which we can definitely recognize is that of the eighteen-eighties, roughly delimited by the death of George Eliot and the publication of Plain Tales from the Hills.

This scheme can be paralleled in other lands: indeed it is probable that the alternating aggregation and disappearance of genius is, like the booms and slumps of commerce, international-though again as with trade, the dates of each cycle may not exactly tally in all parts of the world. In all Western literatures, certainly, on a time of considerable distinction half way through last century there followed, thirty years later, one of hesitation and decline in

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