Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;

Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.

PEDIGREE

The pedigree of honey

Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.

BEAUTY AND TRUTH

I died for beauty, but was scarce

Adjusted in the tomb,

When one who died for truth was lain

In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?

"For beauty," I replied.

"And I for truth, the two are one; We brethren are,” he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,

We talked between the rooms,

Until the moss had reached our lips

And covered up our names.

MYSTERIES

The murmur of a bee
A witchcraft yieldeth me.
If any ask me why,
'Twere easier to die
Than tell.

2

The red upon the hill
Taketh away my will;
If anybody sneer,

Take care, for God is here,
That's all.

The breaking of the day
Addeth to my degree;
If any ask me how,
Artist, who drew me so,
Must tell!

PRECIOUS WORDS

He ate and drank the precious words.
His spirit grew robust;

He knew no more that he was poor,

Nor that his frame was dust.

He danced along the dingy days,

And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in 1836 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he spent most of the sixteen years which he has recorded in that delightful memoir, The Story of a Bad Boy (1869). From 1855 to 1866 he held various journalistic positions, associating himself with the leading metropolitan literati. A few years later he became editor of the famous Atlantic Monthly, holding that position from 1881 to 1890. He died in 1907.

Aldrich's work falls into two sharply-divided classes. The first half is full of overloaded phrase-making, fervid extravagances. The reader sinks beneath clouds of damask, azure, emerald, pearl and gold; he is drowned in a sea of musk, aloes, tiger-lilies, spice, soft music, orchids, attar-breathing dusks.

The second phase of Aldrich's art is more human in appeal as it is surer in artistry. "In the little steel engravings that are the best

expressions of his peculiar talent," writes Percy H. Boynton, “there is a fine simplicity; but it is the simplicity of an accomplished woman of the world rather than of a village maid.” Although Aldrich bitterly resented the charge that he was a maker of tiny perfections, a carver of cherry-stones, those poems of his which have the best chance of permanence are the short lyrics and a few of the sonnets, exquisite in design.

MEMORY

My mind lets go a thousand things,
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour

'Twas noon by yonder village tower,
And on the last blue noon in May
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly
Two petals from that wild-rose tree.

'ENAMORED ARCHITECT OF AIRY RHYME

Enamored architect of airy rhyme,

Build as thou wilt, heed not what each man says.
Good souls, but innocent of dreamers' ways,
Will come, and marvel why thou wastest time;
Others, beholding how thy turrets climb

'Twixt theirs and heaven, will hate thee all thy days;
But most beware of those who come to praise.

O wondersmith, O worker in sublime

And heaven-sent dreams, let art be all in all;
Build as thou wilt, unspoiled by praise or blame,
Build as thou wilt, and as thy light is given;
Then, if at last the airy structure fall,
Dissolve, and vanish- take thyself no shame.
They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.

John Hay was born at Salem, Indiana, in 1838, graduated from Brown University in 1858 and was admitted to the Illinois bar a few years later. He became private secretary to Lincoln, then major and assistant adjutant-general under General Gilmore, then secretary of legation at Paris, chargé d'affaires at Vienna and secretary of legation at Madrid.

His few vivid Pike County Ballads came more as a happy accident than as a deliberate creative effort. When Hay returned from Spain in 1870, bringing with him his Castilian Days, he had visions of becoming an orthodox lyric poet. But he found everyone reading Bret Harte's short stories and the new expression of the rude West. (See Preface.) He speculated upon the possibility of doing something similar, translating the characters into poetry. The result was the six racy ballads in a vein utterly different from everything Hay wrote before or after.

Hay was in politics all the later part of his life, ranking as one of the most brilliant Secretaries of State the country has ever had. He died in 1905.

JIM BLUDSO

Of the Prairie Belle

Wall, no! I can't tell whar he lives,
Becase he don't live, you see;
Leastways, he's got out of the habit
Of livin' like you and me.

Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven't heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?

He warn't no saint, them engineers
Is all pretty much alike,

One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill
And another one here, in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never flunked, and he never lied,
I reckon he never knowed how.

And this was all the religion he had:
To treat his engine well;
Never be passed on the river;

To mind the pilot's bell;

And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,
A thousand times he swore,
He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.

All boats has their day on the Mississip,
And her day come at last,

The Movastar was a better boat,

But the Belle she wouldn't be passed.
And so she came tearin' along that night —
The oldest craft on the line

With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,
And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.

The fire bust out as she clar'd the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,

And quick as a flash she turned and made

For that willer-bank on the right.

Thar was runnin' and cussin', but Jim yelled out,

Over all the infernal roar,

“I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank

Till the last galoot's ashore."

Through the hot, black breath of the burnin' boat
Jim Bludso's voice was heard,

And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And, sure's you're born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,

And Bludso's ghost went up alone

In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He warn't no saint, but at jedgement
I'd run my chance with Jim,

'Longside of some pious gentlemen

That wouldn't shook hands with him.