What are ye?

I know not:

V

Nor what I really do

When I move and govern you.

There is no small work unto God.
He requires of us greatness;
Of his least creature

A high angelic nature,

Stature superb and bright completeness.
He sets to us no humble duty.

Each act that he would have us do
Is haloed round with strangest beauty;
Terrific deeds and cosmic tasks
Of his plainest child he asks.
When I polish the brazen pan
I hear a creature laugh afar
In the gardens of a star,

And from his burning presence run
Flaming wheels of many a sun.
Whoever makes a thing more bright,

He is an angel of all light.

When I cleanse this earthen floor

My spirit leaps to see

Bright garments trailing over it,

A cleanness made by me.

Purger of all men's thoughts and ways, With labor do I sound Thy praise,

My work is done for Thee.

Whoever makes a thing more bright,

He is an angel of all light.

Therefore let me spread abroad

The beautiful cleanness of my God.

VI

One time in the cool of dawn
Angels came and worked with me.

The air was soft with many a wing.
They laughed amid my solitude
And cast bright looks on everything.
Sweetly of me did they ask

That they might do my common task.
And all were beautiful — but one
With garments whiter than the sun
Had such a face

Of deep, remembered grace;
That when I saw I cried

66

Thou art

The great Blood-Brother of my heart.
Where have I seen thee? And he said,
“When we are dancing round God's throne,
How often thou art there.

Beauties from thy hands have flown
Like white doves wheeling in mid air.
Nay thy soul remembers not?

Work on, and cleanse thy iron pot."

VII

What are we? I know not.

AMY LOWELL

Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, February 9, 1874, of a long line of noted publicists and poets, the first colonist (a Percival Lowell) arriving in Newburyport in 1637. James Russell Lowell was a cousin of her grandfather; Abbott Lawrence, her mother's father, was minister to England; and Abbott Lawrence Lowell, her brother, is president of Harvard University.

Her first volume, A Dome of Many-colored Glass (1912), was a strangely unpromising book. The subjects were as conventional as the treatment of them; the influence of Keats and Tennyson' was evident; the tone was soft and almost without a trace of personality. It was a queer prologue to the vivid Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) and Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), which marked not only an extraordinary advance but a totally new individuality. These two volumes contained many distinctive poems written in the usual forms,

a score of pictorial pieces illustrating Miss Lowell's identification with the Imagists (see Preface) and the first appearance in English of "polyphonic prose."

It was because of such experiments in form and technique that Miss Lowell first attracted attention and is still best known. But, beneath her preoccupation with theories and novelty of utterance, one can observe and appreciate the designer of arabesques, the poet of the external world, the dynamic artificer who (vide such poems as . "A Lady," "Vintage" and the epical "Bronze Horses") revivifies history with a creative excitement.

Can Grande's Castle (1918), like the later Legends (1921), reveals Miss Lowell as the gifted narrator, the teller of bizarre and brilliant stories. The feverish agitation is less prominent in her quieter and more personal Pictures of the Floating World (1919), a no less distinctive collection.

Legends (1921) is a volume closely related to Can Grande's Castle. Here are eleven stories placed against seven different backgrounds. All of them are as unusual as what the reader had come to expect of Miss Lowell; the first one must be rated among her most dazzling achievements. Among her posthumous work, What's O'Clock? (1925) is the most outstanding; it includes verses which establish a close kinship with her environment. "Lilacs" and "Meeting-House Hill" are two in this genre. East Wind (1926) and Ballads for Sale (1927) are other posthumous books, the first a set of New England dramas and tales, the second a miscellaneous collection.

Besides Miss Lowell's original poetry, she undertook many studies in foreign literatures; she made the English versions of the poems translated from the Chinese by Florence Ayscough in the vivid FirFlower Tablets (1921). She also wrote two volumes of critical essays: Six French Poets (1915) and Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), both of them invaluable aids to the student of contemporary literature. Two years after its publication she acknowledged the authorship of the anonymous A Critical Fable (1922), a modern sequel to James Russell Lowell's A Fable for Critics. Her monumental John Keats, an exhaustive biography and analysis of the poet in two volumes, appeared early in 1925.

For years Miss Lowell had been suffering from ill health; she had been operated upon several times, but her general condition as well as her continual desire to work, nullified the effects of the operations. In April, 1925, her condition became worse; she was forced to cancel a projected lecture trip through England and to cease all work. She died as the result of an unexpected paralytic stroke on May 12, 1925.

A LADY 1

You are beautiful and faded,
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;

Or like the sun-flooded silks

Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.

In your eyes

Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,

And the perfume of your soul

Is vague and suffusing,

With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.

Your half-tones delight me,

And I grow mad with gazing

At your blent colors.

My vigor is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.

Gather it up from the dust

That its sparkle may amuse you.

SOLITAIRE

When night drifts along the streets of the city,
And sifts down between the uneven roofs,
My mind begins to peek and peer.

It plays at ball in odd, blue Chinese gardens,
And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples
Amid the broken flutings of white pillars.

It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair,
And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses.
How light and laughing my mind is,

When all good folk have put out their bedroom candles, And the city is still.

1 All the poems by Amy Lowell are used by permission of, and special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers.

MEETING-HOUSE HILL

I must be mad, or very tired,

When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track

Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune, And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city

square

Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.

Clear, reticent, superbly final,

With the pillars of its portico refined to a cautious elegance, It dominates the weak trees,

And the shot of its spire

Is cool and candid,

Rising into an unresisting sky.

Strange meeting-house

Pausing a moment upon a squalid hill-top.
I watch the spire sweeping the sky,

I am dizzy with the movement of the sky;
I might be watching a mast

With its royals set full

Straining before a two-reef breeze.

I might be sighting a tea-clipper,

Tacking into the blue bay,

Just back from Canton

With her hold full of green and blue porcelain
And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail
Gazing at the white spire

With dull, sea-spent eyes.

WIND AND SILVER

Greatly shining,

The Autumn moon floats in the thin sky;

And the fish-ponds shake their backs and flash their dragon

scales

As she passes over them.