A STEIN SONG

(From "Spring")

Give a rouse, then, in the Maytime
For a life that knows no fear!
Turn night-time into daytime
With the sunlight of good cheer!
For it's always fair weather

When good fellows get together,

With a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear.

When the wind comes up from Cuba,
And the birds are on the wing,
And our hearts are patting juba
To the banjo of the spring,

Then it's no wonder whether

The boys will get together,

With a stein on the table and a cheer for everything.

For we're all frank-and-twenty

When the spring is in the air; And we've faith and hope a-plenty, And we've life and love to spare:

And it's birds of a feather

When we all get together,

With a stein on the table and a heart with

out a care.

For we know the world is glorious,

And the goal a golden thing,

And that God is not censorious

When his children have their fling;

And life slips its tether

When the boys get together,

With a stein on the table in the fellowship of spring.

Madison Cawein

Madison (Julius) Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1865, and spent most of his life in the state of his birth. He wrote an enormous quantity of verse, publishing more than twenty volumes of pleasant, sometimes exuberant but seldom distinguished poetry. Lyrics and Idyls (1890) and Vale of Tempe (1905) contain his most characteristic stanzas, packed with an adjectival love of Nature that led certain of his admirers to call him (and, one must admit, the alliteration was tempting) "the Keats of Kentucky."

Cawein died in Kentucky in 1914.

SNOW

The moon, like a round device
On a shadowy shield of war,
Hangs white in a heaven of ice
With a solitary star.

The wind has sunk to a sigh,

And the waters are stern with frost;

And gray, in the eastern sky,
The last snow-cloud is lost.

White fields, that are winter-starved,
Black woods, that are winter-fraught,
Cold, harsh, as a face death-carved,
With the iron of some black thought.

DESERTED

The old house leans upon a tree

Like some old man upon a staff:
The night wind in its ancient porch
Sounds like a hollow laugh.

The heaven is wrapped in flying clouds
As grandeur cloaks itself in gray:
The starlight flitting in and out,
Glints like a lanthorn ray.

The dark is full of whispers. Now

A fox-hound howls: and through the night,
Like some old ghost from out its grave,
The moon comes misty white.

William Vaughn Moody

William Vaughn Moody was born at Spencer, Indiana, July 1, 1869, and was educated at Harvard. After graduation, he spent the remaining eighteen years of his life in travel and intensive study-he taught, for eight years, at the University of Chicago-his death coming at the very height of his creative

power.

The Masque of Judgment, his first work, was published in 1900. A richer and more representative collection appeared the year following; in Poems (1901) Moody effected that mingling of challenging lyricism and spiritual philosophy which becomes more and more insistent. (See Preface.) Throughout his career, particularly in such lines as the hotly expostulating "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines" Moody successfully achieves the rare union of poet and preacher. A complete edition of The Poems and Poetic Dramas of William Vaughn Moody was published in 1912 in two volumes.

In the summer of 1909 Moody was stricken with the illness from which he never recovered. He died in October, 1910.

ON A SOLDIER FALLEN IN THE PHILIPPINES

Streets of the roaring town,
Hush for him; hush, be still!

He comes, who was stricken down
Doing the word of our will.
Hush! Let him have his state.
Give him his soldier's crown,

The grists of trade can wait

Their grinding at the mill.

But he cannot wait for his honor, now the trumpet has been blown.

Wreathe pride now for his granite brow, lay love on his breast of stone.

Toll!

Let the great bells toll
Till the clashing air is dim,
Did we wrong this parted soul?

We will make it up to him.
Toll! Let him never guess
What work we sent him to.

Laurel, laurel, yes.

He did what we bade him do.

Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was good;

Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country's own heart's-blood.

A flag for a soldier's bier

Who dies that his land may live;

O banners, banners here,

That he doubt not nor misgive!

That he heed not from the tomb
The evil days draw near

When the nation robed in gloom

With its faithless past shall strive.

Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide of its island mark,

Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the dark.

George Sterling

George Sterling was born at Sag Harbor, New York, December 1, 1869, and educated at various private schools in the Eastern States. He moved to the far West about 1895 and has lived in California ever since.

Of Sterling's ten volumes of poetry, A Wine of Wizardry (1908) and The House of Orchids and Other Poems (1911) are the most characteristic.

THE BLACK VULTURE

Aloof upon the day's immeasured dome,
He holds unshared the silence of the sky.
Far down his bleak, relentless eyes descry
The eagle's empire and the falcon's home-
Far down, the galleons of sunset roam;

His hazards on the sea of morning lie;
Serene, he hears the broken tempest sigh
Where cold sierras gleam like scattered foam.
And least of all he holds the human swarm-
Unwitting now that envious men prepare

To make their dream and its fulfillment one,
When, poised above the caldrons of the storm,
Their hearts, contemptuous of death, shall dare

His roads between the thunder and the sun.