himself go completely; nothing remained sober or static. His lines fling themselves across the page; shout with a wild irresponsibility; leap, laugh, carouse and carry off the reader in a gale of high spirits.

"At the Crossroads" is a vivid example of this gipsy-like spirit which could (as in "Unmanifest Destiny," written on the outbreak of the Spanish-American War) sound deeper notes with equal strength. The famous Stein Song is but an interlude in the midst of a far finer and even more rousing poem that, with its flavor of Whitman, begins:

I said in my heart, “I am sick of four walls and a ceiling. I have need of the sky.

I have business with the grass.

I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling,
Lone and high,

And the slow clouds go by.

I will get me away to the waters that glass

The clouds as they pass.

Although the varied lyrics in Songs from Vagabondia are the best known examples of Hovey, a representative collection of his riper work may be found in Along the Trail (1898). Hovey died, during his thirty-sixth year, in 1900.

AT THE CROSSROADS

You to the left and I to the right,
For the ways of men must sever—
And it well may be for a day and a night,
And it well may be forever.

But whether we meet or whether we part
(For our ways are past our knowing),
A pledge from the heart to its fellow heart
On the ways we all are going!

Here's luck!

For we know not where we are going.

Whether we win or whether we lose
With the hands that life is dealing,
It is not we nor the ways we choose
But the fall of the cards that's sealing.
There's a fate in love and a fate in fight,

And the best of us all go under—

And whether we're wrong or whether we're right, We win, sometimes, to our wonder.

Here's luck!

That we may not yet go under!

With a steady swing and an open brow
We have tramped the ways together,

But we're clasping hands at the crossroads now
In the Fiend's own night for weather;

And whether we bleed or whether we smile

In the leagues that lie before us
The ways of life are many a mile
And the dark of Fate is o'er us.
Here's luck!

And a cheer for the dark before us!

You to the left and I to the right,

For the ways of men must sever,

And it well may be for a day and a night
And it well may be forever!

But whether we live or whether we die
(For the end is past our knowing),

Here's two frank hearts and the open sky,
Be a fair or an ill wind blowing!
Here's luck!

In the teeth of all winds blowing.

UNMANIFEST DESTINY

To what new fates, my country, far
And unforeseen of foe or friend,
Beneath what unexpected star

Compelled to what unchosen end,

Across the sea that knows no beach,
The Admiral of Nations guides
Thy blind obedient keels to reach
The harbor where thy future rides!

The guns that spoke at Lexington
Knew not that God was planning then
The trumpet word of Jefferson

To bugle forth the rights of men.

To them that wept and cursed Bull Run, What was it but despair and shame?

Who saw behind the cloud the sun? Who knew that God was in the flame?

Had not defeat upon defeat,
Disaster on disaster come,

The slave's emancipated feet

Had never marched behind the drum.

There is a Hand that bends our deeds

To mightier issues than we planned; Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds, My country, serves It's dark command.

I do not know beneath what sky
Nor on what seas shall be thy fate;
I only know it shall be high,

I only know it shall be great.

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.