lyric, "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion," a triumph of despair and disillusion, is an outburst in which Dowson epitomized himself "One of the greatest lyrical poems of our time," writes Arthur Symons; "in it he has for once said everything, and he has said it to an intoxicating and perhaps immortal music."

Dowson died obscure in 1900, one of the finest of modern minor poets. His life was the tragedy of a weak nature buffeted by a strong and merciless environment.

TO ONE IN BEDLAM

With delicate, mad hands, behind his sordid bars,
Surely he hath his posies, which they tear and twine;
Those scentless wisps of straw that, miserable, line
His strait, caged universe, whereat the dull world stares.

Pedant and pitiful. O, how his rapt gaze wars
With their stupidity! Know they what dreams divine
Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchanted wine,
And make his melancholy germane to the stars'?

O lamentable brother! if those pity thee,
Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me;

Half a fool's kingdom, far from men who sow and reap,
All their days, vanity? Better than mortal flowers,
Thy moon-kissed roses seem: better than love or sleep,
The star-crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours!

"A. E."

(George William Russell)

north of Ireland, George

At Lurgan, a tiny town in the William Russell was born in 1867. He moved to Dublin when he was 10 years old and, as a young man, helped to form

the group that gave rise to the Irish Renascence-the group of which William Butler Yeats, Doctor Douglas Hyde, Katharine Tynan and Lady Gregory were brilliant members. Besides being a splendid mystical poet, "A. E." is a painter of note, a fiery nationalist, a distinguished sociologist, a public speaker, a student of economics and one of the heads of the Irish Agricultural Association.

The best of his mystical poetry is in Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894) and The Earth Breath and Other Poems. Yeats has spoken of these poems as "revealing in all things a kind of scented flame consuming them from within."

CONTINUITY

No sign is made while empires pass,
The flowers and stars are still His care,
The constellations hid in grass,

The golden miracles in air.

Life in an instant will be rent,

Where death is glittering blind and wild-
The Heavenly Brooding is intent

To that last instant on Its child.

It breathes the glow in brain and heart,
Life is made magical. Until
Body and spirit are apart,

The Everlasting works Its will.

In that wild orchid that your feet
In their next falling shall destroy,
Minute and passionate and sweet
The Mighty Master holds His joy.
Though the crushed jewels droop and fade,
The Artist's labors will not cease,

And of the ruins shall be made

Some yet more lovely masterpiece.

THE UNKNOWN GOD

Far up the dim twilight fluttered
Moth-wings of vapour and flame:
The lights danced over the mountains,
Star after star they came.

The lights grew thicker unheeded,
For silent and still were we;
Our hearts were drunk with a beauty
Our eyes could never see.

Stephen Phillips

Born in 1868, Stephen Phillips is best known as the author of Herod (1900), Paola and Francesca (1899), and Ulysses (1902); a poetic playwright who succeeded in reviving, for a brief interval, the blank verse drama on the modern stage.

Phillips failed to "restore" poetic drama because he was, first of all, a lyric rather than a dramatic poet. In spite of certain moments of rhetorical splendor, his scenes are spectacular instead of emotional; his inspiration is too often derived from other models. He died in 1915.

FRAGMENT FROM "HEROD"

Herod speaks:

I dreamed last night of a dome of beaten gold

To be a counter-glory to the Sun.

There shall the eagle blindly dash himself,

There the first beam shall strike, and there the moon Shall aim all night her argent archery;

And it shall be the tryst of sundered stars,
The haunt of dead and dreaming Solomon;
Shall send a light upon the lost in Hell,
And flashings upon faces without hope.-
And I will think in gold and dream in silver,
Imagine in marble and conceive in bronze,
Till it shall dazzle pilgrim nations

And stammering tribes from undiscovered lands,
Allure the living God out of the bliss,
And all the streaming seraphim from heaven.

A DREAM

My dead love came to me, and said:
"God gives me one hour's rest,
To spend with thee on earth again:
How shall we spend it best?"

"Why, as of old," I said; and so

We quarrelled, as of old:

But, when I turned to make my peace,
That one short hour was told.

Laurence Binyon

(Robert) Laurence Binyon was born at Lancaster, August 10, 1869, a cousin of Stephen Phillips; in Primavera (1890) their early poems appeared together. Binyon's subsequent volumes showed little distinction until he published London Visions, which, in an enlarged edition in 1908, revealed a gift of characterization and a turn of speech in surprising contrast to his previous academic Lyrical Poems (1894).

A SONG

For Mercy, Courage, Kindness, Mirth,
There is no measure upon earth.
Nay, they wither, root and stem,
If an end be set to them.

Overbrim and overflow,

If your own heart you would know;
For the spirit born to bless

Lives but in its own excess.

THE UNSEEN FLOWER

I think of a flower that no eye ever has seen,
That springs in a solitary air.

Is it no one's joy? It is beautiful as a queen
Without a kingdom's care.

We have built houses for Beauty, and costly shrines, And a throne in all men's view:

But she was far on a hill where the morning shines And her steps were lost in the dew.

Anthony C. Deane

Anthony C. Deane was born in 1870 and was the Seatonian prizeman in 1905 at Clare College, Cambridge. He has been Vicar of All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, since 1916. His long list of light verse and essays includes many excellent parodies, the most brilliant and delightful being found in his New Rhymes for Old (1901).