exception of Charlotte Mew and Wilfred Owen, whose verse was posthumously published) have formed themselves in a loose group called "The Georgians," and an anthology of their best work has appeared every two years since 1913. Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drinkwater are also listed among the Georgian poets. When their first collection appeared in March, 1913, Henry Newbolt, critic as well as poet, wrote: "These younger poets have no temptation to be false. They are not for making something 'pretty,' something up to the standard of professional patterns. . . . They write as grown men walk, each with his own unconscious stride and gesture. . . . In short, they express themselves and seem to steer without an effort between the dangers of innovation and reminiscence."

...

The secret of this success is not an exclusive discovery of the modern poets. It is their inheritance, derived from those predecessors who, "from Wordsworth and Coleridge onward, have worked for the assimilation of verse to the manner and accent of natural speech." In its adaptability no less than in its vigor, modern English poetry is true to its period-and its past.

Austin Dobson

(Henry) Austin Dobson was born at Plymouth, in 1840, and was educated in Wales and on the Continent. In 1856, he received a clerkship in The Board of Trade and remained in official life a great part of his life.

His first collection, Vignettes in Rhyme (1873), attracted attention by the ease with which the author managed his dexterous and most difficult effects. With Proverbs in Porcelain (1877), Old World Idylls (1883) and At the Sign of the Lyre (1885), it was evident that a new master of vers de société had arisen. The crispness and clean delicacy of his verse make him the peer of Prior, Praed and Thomas Hood.

During the latter part of his life, he devoted himself to a type of semi-biographical essay, intended to preserve the spirit of some nearly- or wholly-forgotten celebrity. In this form, his prose is scarcely less distinctive than his verse; his detailed and charmingly dispensed knowledge of the time of Queen Anne gives to his writings its own special flavor of "archaic gentility”. Although most of his rhymes are charming rather than profound, certain pages, like "Before Sedan," are memorable for their serious clarity.

Dobson died September 3, 1921.

IN AFTER DAYS

In after days when grasses high
O'ertop the stone where I shall lie,
Though ill or well the world adjust
My slender claim to honored dust,
I shall not question or reply.

I shall not see the morning sky;
I shall not hear the night-wind's sigh;
I shall be mute, as all men must
In after days!

But yet, now living, fain were I
That some one then should testify,
Saying "He held his pen in trust
To Art, not serving shame or lust."
Will none? Then let my memory die
In after days!

BEFORE SEDAN

"The dead hand clasped a letter." -Special Correspondence.

Here in this leafy place

Quiet he lies,

Cold with his sightless face

Turned to the skies;

'Tis but another dead;

All you can say is said.

Carry his body hence,

Kings must have slaves;
Kings climb to eminence
Over men's graves:
So this man's eye is dim;—
Throw the earth over him.

What was the white you touched,

There, at his side?

Paper his hand had clutched

Tight ere he died;

Message or wish, may be;

Smooth the folds out and see.

Hardly the worst of us
Here could have smiled!
Only the tremulous

Words of a child;
Prattle, that has for stops
Just a few ruddy drops.

Look. She is sad to miss,
Morning and night,

His her dead father's-kiss;
Tries to be bright,

Good to mamma, and sweet.
That is all. "Marguerite."

Ah, if beside the dead

Slumbered the pain!
Ah, if the hearts that bled
Slept with the slain!
If the grief died; but no.
Death will not have it so.

Wilfred Scawen Blunt

Wilfred Scawen Blunt was born at Crabbet Park, Crawley, Sussex, in 1840. He was educated at St. Mary's College, Oscott, and was a member of the diplomatic service from 1850 to 1870. He spent many years in the East, his observations making him strongly sympathetic to lesser nationalities and all the downtrodden. He favored the cause of the Egyptians; his voice was always lifted for justice to Ireland.

As a poet, he is best known by his The Love Sonnets of Proteus (1881) and The New Pilgrimage (1889). Both volumes reveal a deep, philosophical nature expressing itself in terms of high seriousness.

His remarkable My Diaries appeared when Blunt was an octogenarian, in 1921.

LAUGHTER AND DEATH

There is no laughter in the natural world
Of beast or fish or bird, though no sad doubt
Of their futurity to them unfurled

Has dared to check the mirth-compelling shout.
The lion roars his solemn thunder out

To the sleeping woods. The eagle screams her cry.
Even the lark must strain a serious throat
To hurl his blest defiance at the sky.

Fear, anger, jealousy, have found a voice.
Love's pain or rapture the brute bosoms swell.
Nature has symbols for her nobler joys,
Her nobler sorrows. Who has dared foretell
That only man, by some sad mockery,

Should learn to laugh who learns that he must die?

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, and has for years been famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer of intense and sombre novels. His Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are possibly his best known, although his Wessex Tales and Life's Little Ironies are no less imposing.

It was not until he was almost sixty, in 1898 to be precise, that Hardy abandoned prose and challenged attention as a poet. The Dynasts, a drama of the Napoleonic Wars, is in three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes, a massive and most amazing contribution to contemporary art. His Collected Poems were published by The Macmillan Company in 1919 and reveal another and noble phase of one of the greatest living writers of English.