Let cowards and laggards fall back! But alert to the saddle Weatherworn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion, With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him. The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and morasses; There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us: What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are vowed to the riding. Thought's self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb, I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind; Bliss Carman (William) Bliss Carman was born at Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, April 15, 1861, of a long line of United Empire Loyalists who withdrew from Connecticut at the time of the Revolutionary War. Carman was educated at the University of New Brunswick (1879-81), at Edinburgh (1882-3) and Harvard (1886-8). He took up his residence in the United States about 1889 and, with the exception of short sojourns in the Maritime Provinces, has lived there ever since. In 1893, Carman issued his first book, Low Tide on Grand Pré: A Book of Lyrics. It was immediately successful, running quickly into a second edition. A vivid buoyancy, new to American literature, made his worship of Nature frankly pagan as contrasted to the moralizing tributes of most of his predecessors. This freshness and irresponsible whimsy made Carman the natural collaborator for Richard Hovey, and when their first joint Songs from Vagabondia appeared in 1894, Carman's fame was established. (See Preface.) Although the three Vagabondia collections contain Carman's best known poems, several of his other volumes (he has published almost twenty of them) vibrate with the same glowing pulse. An almost physical radiance rises from Ballads of Lost Haven (1897), From the Book of Myths (1902) and Songs of the Sea Children (1904). A VAGABOND SONG There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood Touch of manner, hint of mood; And my heart is like a rhyme, With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time. The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry And my lonely spirit thrills To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills. There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir; We must rise and follow her, When from every hill of flame She calls and calls each vagabond by name. HEM AND HAW Hem and Haw were the sons of sin, Hem lay 'round and Haw looked on Hem was a fogy, and Haw was a prig, Hem was the father of bigots and bores; But God was an artist from the first, And knew what he was about; While over his shoulder sneered these two, And advised him to rub it out. They prophesied ruin ere man was made; "Such folly must surely fail!” And when he was done, "Do you think, my Lord, He's better without a tail?" And still in the honest working world, With posture and hint and smirk, These sons of the devil are standing by They balk endeavor and baffle reform, And over the quavering voice of Hem DAISIES Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell, Richard Burton Richard (Eugene) Burton was born at Hartford, Connecticut, March 14, 1861. He has taught English at various colleges and universities since 1888, and has been head of the English department of the University of Minnesota since 1906. His first book Dumb in June (1895), is, in many ways, his best. It contains a buoyant lyricism, a more conscious use of the strain developed in Carman and Hovey's Songs from Vagabondia. The succeeding Lyrics of Brotherhood (1899) has a wider vision if a more limited music; several of the poems in this collection reflect the hungers, dreams and unsung melodies of the dumb and defeated multitudes. BLACK SHEEP From their folded mates they wander far, Their ways seem harsh and wild; They follow the beck of a baleful star, Their paths are dream-beguiled. Yet haply they sought but a wider range, And little recked of the country 'strange And haply a bell with a luring call Midst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfall Maybe, in spite of their tameless days They're sick at heart for the homely ways And oft at night, when the plains fall dark Meanwhile, "Black sheep! Black sheep!" we cry, And maybe they hear, and wonder why, Richard Hovey Richard Hovey was born in 1864 at Normal, Illinois, and graduated from Dartmouth in 1885. After leaving college, he became, in rapid succession, a theologian, an actor, a journalist, a lecturer, a professor of English literature at Barnard, a poet and a dramatist. His exuberant virility found its outlet in the series of poems published in collaboration with Bliss Carman-the three volumes of Songs from Vagabondia (1894, 1896, 1900). Here he let |