slipping terms of speech. The music which he employs is wholly traditional; he disdains none of the older properties no matter how often they have been repeated.

Auslander's subsequent verse has grown cooler and sharper. His touch is no less delicate, but he does not attempt to make the strings quiver with a continual vibrato. A firmness, almost a toughness, has entered his work and readers of his second volume, Cyclops' Eye (1926), will find a melodist who is no longer a poet of promise but one of possession. The long poem "Steel" and the two straightforward lyrics reprinted here are proofs of this.

THESE ARE THE OLD

These are the old — the brave, the broken
Old little people: these are the old.
And there is something they have not spoken,
And there is something they have not told:
Something about growing old together
Under the bleak or the friendly weather;
Something about the bare, chill room,
The depressing poverty odor, the gloom
That slinks up the tenement stairs; and their pride;
And the Specter that keeps them crucified..
These are the people too sick, too cold,
Too hungry, too proud: these are the old.

REMEMBER ME, GULLS!

This is my hour between the flight and the flight
Of the trumpet-gulls manoeuvring in half-light;
Putting their beaks on edge

With colour; making a wedge

Between the livid twilight and the night.

Soon they will quiet their aquiline throats; and soon,
While the sun crumples like a little balloon

On fire, their wings will go slack,

The moon shift almond on black,

And clouds will hook their brooding claws on the moon.

Remember me, gulls; remember me, white birds flying In narrow circles where the nets are drying!

By water and wind and the hot

Reek of the beach rot,

Remember me, gulls, cutting to the north and crying!

STEPHEN VINCENT BENET

Stephen Vincent Benét, the younger brother of William Rose Benét, was born at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in July, 1898. He was educated in various parts of the country, graduating from Yale in 1919.

At seventeen he published a small book containing six dramatic portraits, Five Men and Pompey (1915), a remarkable set of monologues which, in spite of distinct traces of Browning, was little short of astounding, coming from a schoolboy. In Benét's next volume, Young Adventure (1918), one hears something more than the speech of an infant prodigy; the precocious facility has developed into an individual vigor.

Heavens and Earth (1920) and Tiger Joy (1925), the most representative collections, have a greater imaginative sweep. His first novel, The Beginning of Wisdom, appeared in 1921. Like his brother, the younger Benét is at his best in the decoratively grotesque; his fancy exults in running the scales between the whimsically bizarre and the lightly diabolic.

PORTRAIT OF A BOY

After the whipping, he crawled into bed;
Accepting the harsh fact with no great weeping.
How funny uncle's hat had looked striped red!
He chuckled silently. The moon came, sweeping
A black frayed rag of tattered cloud before
In scorning; very pure and pale she seemed,
Flooding his bed with radiance. On the floor

Fat motes danced. He sobbed; closed his eyes and dreamed.

Warm sand flowed round him. Blurts of crimson light Splashed the white grains like blood. Past the cave's mouth

Shone with a large fierce splendor, wildly bright,
The crooked constellations of the South;
Here the Cross swung; and there, affronting Mars,
The Centaur stormed aside a froth of stars.
Within, great casks like wattled aldermen
Sighed of enormous feasts, and cloth of gold
Glowed on the walls like hot desire. Again,
Beside webbed purples from some galleon's hold,
A black chest bore the skull and bones in white
Above a scrawled "Gunpowder!" By the flames,
Decked out in crimson, gemmed with syenite,
Hailing their fellows by outrageous names

66

The pirates sat and diced. Their eyes were moons. Doubloons!" they said. The words crashed gold. " Doubloons!

LÉONIE ADAMS

Léonie Adams was born in Brooklyn, New York, December 9, 1899. After a public school preparation she became a member of the class of 1922 at Barnard College, where she wrote her first published poems "in secret. "While she was still an undergraduate, her remarkable "April Mortality" was printed in The New Republic, but, although this would have been sufficient stimulus for most young authors to rush into print, Miss Adams became more reticent than ever and rarely submitted any of her verse for publication.

It was only through the persuasion of two or three of her friends that her volume, Those Not Elect (1925), was made ready for the press. The author's own evasion of “realism" is apparent in all of her poetry. The poems themselves are of two sorts: the younger and simpler verses, full of a shy ecstasy, and the later, more metaphysical expressions of a rare and not so easily communicable wonder. But whatever her style, her sensitivity makes even the obscure passages a succession of splendid images. And there is no mistaking either her restraint or the beauty of her emotion. There is not a line in her work which is without suggestive distinction.

APRIL MORTALITY

Rebellion shook an ancient dust,

And bones bleached dry of rottenness Said: Heart, be bitter still, nor trust

The earth, the sky, in their bright dress.

Heart, heart, dost thou not break to know This anguish thou wilt bear alone?

We

sang of it an age ago,

And traced it dimly upon stone.

With all the drifting race of men
Thou also art begot to mourn
That she is crucified again,

The lonely Beauty yet unborn.

And if thou dreamest to have won Some touch of her in permanence, 'Tis the old cheating of the sun,

The intricate lovely play of sense.

Be bitter still, remember how
Four petals, when a little breath
Of wind made stir the pear-tree bough,
Blew delicately down to death.

HOME-COMING

When I stepped homeward to my hill
Dusk went before with quiet tread;
The bare laced branches of the trees
Were as a mist about its head.

Upon its leaf-brown breast, the rocks
Like great gray sheep lay silent-wise;
Between the birch trees' gleaming arms,
The faint stars trembled in the skies.

The white brook met me half-way up
And laughed as one that knew me well,
To whose more clear than crystal voice
The frost had joined a crystal spell.

The skies lay like pale-watered deep.
Dusk ran before me to its strand
And cloudily leaned forth to touch

The moon's slow wonder with her hand.

Edwin Morgan was born in 1899 in New York City, was graduated from New York University and studied literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. Although he has published little, his "Prayer" shows him in possession of an utterance that is no less rich for being restrained.