Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,

Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

THE MASTER *1

(Lincoln as seen, presumably, by one of his contemporaries, shortly after the Civil War)

1

A flying word from here and there

Had sown the name at which we sneered,

But soon the name was everywhere,

To be reviled and then revered:

A presence to be loved and feared,
We cannot hide it, or deny

That we, the gentlemen who jeered,
May be forgotten by and by.

He came when days were perilous
And hearts of men were sore beguiled;
And having made his note of us,
He pondered and was reconciled.
Was ever master yet so mild
As he, and so untamable?

We doubted, even when he smiled,

Not knowing what he knew so well.

See pages 54, 84, 139, 142, 172.

Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's

Sons, from The Town down the River by E. A. Robinson.

He knew that undeceiving fate

Would shame us whom he served unsought;
He knew that he must wince and wait-

The jest of those for whom he fought;
He knew devoutly what he thought
Of us and of our ridicule;

He knew that we must all be taught
Like little children in a school.

We gave a glamour to the task

That he encountered and saw through,
But little of us did he ask,

And little did we ever do.

And what appears if we review

The season when we railed and chaffed?

It is the face of one who knew

That we were learning while we laughed.

The face that in our vision feels
Again the venom that we flung,
Transfigured to the world reveals
The vigilance to which we clung.
Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among
The mysteries that are untold,
The face we see was never young,
Nor could it ever have been old.

For he, to whom we have applied
Our shopman's test of age and worth,
Was elemental when he died,

As he was ancient at his birth:
The saddest among kings of earth,
Bowed with a galling crown, this man
Met rancor with a cryptic mirth,
Laconic-and Olympian.

The love, the grandeur, and the fame
Are bounded by the world alone;

The calm, the smouldering, and the flame
Of awful patience were his own:
With him they are forever flown
Past all our fond self-shadowings,
Wherewith we cumber the Unknown
As with inept Icarian wings.

For we were not as other men:
'Twas ours to soar and his to see.
But we are coming down again,
And we shall come down pleasantly;
Nor shall we longer disagree
On what it is to be sublime,
But flourish in our perigee
And have one Titan at a time.

1

AN OLD STORY1

Strange that I did not know him then,
That friend of mine!

I did not even show him then
One friendly sign;

But cursed him for the ways he had

To make me see

My envy of the praise he had

For praising me.

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's

Sons, from The Children of the Night.

Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade as if the last of days

Were fading, and all wars were done.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he
walked.

And he was rich-yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, from The Children of the Night.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the
bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters was born at Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 1869, of old Puritan and pioneering stock. When he was still a boy, the family moved to Illinois, where, after desultory schooling, he studied law in his father's office at Lewiston. For a year he practised with his father and then went to Chicago, where he became a successful and prominent attorney. Before going to Chicago, Masters had composed a great quantity of verse in traditional forms on still more traditional themes; by the time he was twenty-four he had written about four hundred poems, revealing the result of wide reading and betraying the influence of Poe, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. His work, previous to the publication of Spoon River Anthology, was derivative and undistinguished.

Taking as his model The Greek Anthology, which his friend William Marion Reedy had pressed upon him, in 1914 Masters evolved Spoon River Anthology, that astonishing assemblage of over two hundred self-inscribed epitaphs, in which the dead of a middle Western town are supposed to have written the truth about themselves. Through these frank revelations, many of them interrelated, the village is recreated for us; it lives again, unvarnished and typical, with all its intrigues, hypocrisies, feuds, martyrdoms and occasional exaltations. The monotony of existence in a drab township, the defeat of ideals, the struggle toward higher goals-all is synthesized in these crowded pages. All moods and all manner of voices are heard here even Masters's, who explains the reason for his medium and the selection of his form through "Petit, the Poet."

Starved Rock (1919), Domesday Book (1920) and The Open Sea (1921) are, like all Masters's later books, queerly assembled mixtures of good, bad and derivative verse. And yet, for all of this poet's borrowings, in spite of his cynicism and disillusion,