More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed-
More filled with signs and portents for the soul-
More packt with danger to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;

Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,

Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,

This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;

Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, inmedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings-
With those who shaped him to the thing he is-
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

PREPAREDNESS

For all your days prepare,

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

When you are the hammer, strike.

1

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 mystic powers,
Moving all husht-behind the mortal vail.
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
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

раёй

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.

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 a not too rugged health to an utter breakdown.

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 Joel 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.

"De Fust Banjo" (from Russell's operetta ChristmasNight in the Quarters, possibly his best known work) is a faithful rendering of the mind of the old-fashioned, simple and sententious child of the plantation. In this poem the old story of Noah is told, with delightful additions, from the colorful angle of the darky, local in its setting, diverting in its modern details and revealing in its quaint psychology.

Russell died, in an obscure boarding house in New Orleans, December 23, 1879.

DE FUST BANJO

Go 'way, fiddle! folks is tired o' hearin' you a-squawkin'. Keep silence fur yo' betters! don't you heah de banjo

talkin'?

About de 'possum's tail she's gwine to lecter-ladies,

listen!

About de ha'r whut isn't dar, an' why de ha'r is missin':

"Dar's gwine to be a' oberflow," said Noah, lookin' 'solemn

Fur Noah tuk de "Herald," an' he read de ribber column

An' so he sot his hands to wuk a-clarin' timber-patches, An' 'lowed he's gwine to build a boat to beat de steamah Natchez.

Ol' Noah kep' a-nailin' an' a-chippin' an' a-sawin';
An' all de wicked neighbors kep' a-laughin' an' a-pshawin';
But Noah didn't min' 'em, knowin' whut wuz gwine to
happen:

An' forty days an' forty nights de rain it kep' a-drappin'.

Now, Noah had done cotched a lot ob ebry sort o' beas'es

Ob all de shows a-trabbelin', it beat 'em all to pieces! He had a Morgan colt an' sebral head o' Jarsey cattleAn' druv 'em 'board de Ark as soon's he heered de thunder rattle.

Den sech anoder fall ob rain! It come so awful hebby,
De ribber riz immejitly, an' busted troo de lebbee;
De people all wuz drownded out-'cep' Noah an' de
critters,

An' men he'd hired to wuk de boat-an' one to mix de bitters.

De Ark she kep' a-sailin' an' a-sailin' an' a-sailin';
De lion got his dander up, an' like to bruk de palin';