Mindful of the eyes upon it,
Vain of its new holiness,

Like the waste-man's little daughter
In her first communion dress.

Stephen Vincent Benét

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), the most representative collection, has a greater imaginative sweep. His 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.

L

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

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 5, 1899. After a public school preparation, she became a member of the class of 1922 at Barnard, writing her first published poems as an undergraduate.

The few poems by Miss Adams which have appeared show an unusual distinction of thought. They establish a kinship with Emily Dickinson by their intellectual restraint, with Edna St. Vincent Millay by their spiritual fervor.

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.

Hilda Conkling

Hilda Conkling, most gifted of recent infant prodigies, was born at Catskill-on-Hudson, New York, October 8, 1910. The daughter of Grace Hazard Conkling (see page 124), she came to Northampton, Massachusetts, with her mother when she was three years old and has lived there ever since.

Hilda began to write poems-or rather, to talk them—at the age of four. Since that time, she has created one hundred and fifty little verses, many of them astonishing in exactness of phrase and beauty of vision.

Poems by a Little Girl (1920), published when Hilda was a little more than nine years old, is a detailed proof of this unaffected originality; "Water," "Hay-Cock," and a dozen others are startling in their precision and a power of painting the familiar in unsuspected colors. She hears a chickadee talking The way smooth bright pebbles Drop into water.

The rooster's comb is "gay as a parade"; he has "pearl trinkets on his feet" and

The short feathers smooth along his back

Are the dark color of wet rocks,

Or the rippled green of ships

When I look at their sides through water.

Everything is extraordinarily vivid and fanciful to the keen senses of this child.

WATER

The world turns softly

Not to spill its lakes and rivers.

The water is held in its arms

And the sky is held in the water.

What is water,

That pours silver,

And can hold the sky?

HAY-COCK

This is another kind of sweetness
Shaped like a bee-hive:

This is the hive the bees have left,
It is from this clover-heap

They took away the honey
For the other hive!

I KEEP WONDERING

I saw a mountain,

And he was like Wotan looking at himself in the water.

I saw a cockatoo,

And he was like sunset clouds.

Even leaves and little stones

Are different to my eyes sometimes.

I keep wondering through and through my heart

Where all the beautiful things in the world

Come from.

And while I wonder

They go on being beautiful.