the Kingdom of God on the earth. In these desires, which range from a mild form of individualism to the grossest and most damnable selfishness, there runs a streak of discontent and disgust because in them the man is not realizing his full nature. We cannot leave out the nobler side of man's effort and have anything in the end but disillusionment, unhappiness and dissatisfaction. We live upon the surface of things with no deep-lying principle to sustain us. Like restless babes we are quieted only with immediate satisfaction. The withdrawal of riches, or the satisfaction of lust-the vanishing of a single dream-leaves the man broken, with the object of life gone. There is here no means of permanent satisfaction, no noble self-realization. One must somehow anchor himself in the nature of things which is God. He must give himself to causes that are eternal, to satisfactions that cannot die, to expressions that are as true for one age as another or, at the very least, to heroisms that stand forth in undying splendor. Often such achievement is possible to the man only after time and sense have robbed him of the trivial and the fading. Such was Dante when his personal dreams vanished into the darkness of the political nightmare of his time and he found his peace in the undying truth of his Dive Comedy. Only he can find highest expression imself who works without fear of time or fate or man or devil, laying one by one the stones in the great foundation of ruth which by their sincerity are beyond cavil, set for all the world to see, to criticize, to condemn for a time but eventually to recognize and adore. To work thus in the absence of praise and against the sharprunning tides of unpopularity and misunderstanding is impossible unless the man has come to some deep understanding with God or, if you prefer it, with truth or with the nature of things. When we put ourselves in tune with the divine order there spring new sources of power which overcome every obstacle, even death itself. Such a man has the force of the universe at his back. It is a literal truth that the stars in their courses fight for him. Because his will is the will of God he cannot be defeated. Such an one can ask what he will and it shall be done unto him because he wills what God has already willed through him. Prayer is the particular need of our own age with its pressing and colossal problems which only they shall be able to solve who keep close to the sources of power. IV. PRAYER AND THE DIVINE CHARACTER No thoughtful reader has come thus far without realization of how one's conception of prayer involves the conception of the divine character. ་་ The false conception of prayer which under garb of pious phrase looks upon it as the cajoling of a divine despot, an unwilling deity, into some form of favoritism to those who live decently and after the forms of religion, is really a travesty upon God's character. Futhermore it makes for unbelief and forms a stumbling-block in the way of the reverently thoughtful. God must be faithful to the unjust as well as to the just, if he is to preserve his character. He cannot be a respecter of persons. He is only a respecter of human needs. I cannot pray down the rain upon my corn that will destroy my neighbor's barley, nor pray the fat job into my possession that mean distress and want for my neighbor who needs it more than 1. Really religious men cannot pray in that way. Unless our prayers are social and include the general good they cannot in the strict sense be considered prayers at all. They are the expressions of selfish wishes. And though our way to this high truth lie through the blinding tears of self-denial it is the only trail which leads out to the highways of God-who loves all his children with an unchanging and equal love. If through our blindness we could see this we should know that in this divine impartiality alone lies the possibility of our salvation. The highest pathway for man lies along the steep ascent of reconciliation with God. Here alone is our peace. TWO SONGS MARY SINTON LEITCH THE DEAD THRUSH Is anything so dead as a dead bird?— So poignantly, so pitifully mute The tender feathered breast no longer stirred By song that, more than viol, harp or flute, TO THE EARTH Before life crawled slow from primordial slime To which our past—our little human day With all its struggle, all its toilsome climb To hard-won heights-seems trivial. Vast, sublime, Unutterable the loneliness that lay Over your steaming beaches and your grey And barren rocks through bleak and empty time; Empty for us, but all fulfilled for you Of majesty before the cries of Cain Smote on your cliffs with clamor harsh and rude. The grandeur of your primal solitude? THE GRAVE BEAUTY OF MASEFIELD'S VERSE JOSEPHINE HAMMOND Late Professor of English, Reed College. Mr. Masefield's verse has filled the topsails of our poetry with fresh winds-crisp down breezes and sea-gales heavy with brine. Even the grim hazards the poet has conjured from his Bye Streets and Roundhouses have brought a clean savour, the taste of good blood fighting on, undaunted, in the muck. Despite the circumscriptions of those who applauded the critic of The Nation when he declared, "If we are to have decadence at all, it is better to have the comely decadence of Walter Pater than the obscene and unseemly decadence of Mr. Masefield", Mr. Masefield's fame has spread until now there are many ready to say of his sweeping verse what the Spaniards say admiringly of their best-regarded women-Here, indeed, is salt. In the main Mr. Masefield has been simple and direct, master of the fit word master of flowing, vibrant narration. There was a time when he fouled his lines, when melodrama had in him a doughty champion. He went so far as to call melodrama tragedy when he wrote Nan. In that play's preface comes this statement: "Tragedy at its best is the vision of the heart of life. The heart of life can only be laid bare in the agony and exultation of dreadful acts." It is a curiously limited point of view, so to stress dreadful acts. Tortures and inquisitions are begotten quite as often by long endurances as by catastrophes. In the verse of our time, the agony and exultation of tragedy rises even more keenly from the strongly controlled situation of Miss Lowell's Patterns than from the frank brutalities of The Daffodil Fields. Tragedy lies not so much in the deed as in the spirit of man. It is not to be supposed, of course, that Mr. Masefield is unaware of such simple criteria: his point of view is one that he chose to defend and to vitalize in his early efforts and its limitations need not lessen to us the more important value of the essential spirit of his work. What that spirit is is suggested by another portion of the preface of Nan: "Commonplace people cannot suffer and cannot exult. The truth and rapture of man are holy things, not lightly to be scorned." It is, I think, because Mr. Masefield holds in reverence the truth and rapture of man that there has been growing in his work a quality even more rare than the sinewy vigor heretofore the gift of his verse. In his maturing work there is a Presence, a Divine White Wonder, a sentient Beauty, grave and wise. It is plain that not only do his marrowy tales, his sea savours, his rich and vivid characterizations of country-side and country folk, set him apart from lesser makers of song: there is ancient earth in this poet: the springs of his genius have known the consecration of an ageless Beauty. They are few in any time who voice the secrets of herthe Beauty that seems to lie behind the grass, the sins, the joys, rebellions, sacrifices, and the stars. Her song is known best by those born adult in the cognizance of life, sung best by those who, like Masefield, invest their words with passions drawn from old, old reservoirs of man's audacities and sighs. Out of recently wrought measures there comes to mind one phrasing instinct with Beauty's immemorial life-those lines of Hardy's he calls In The Time of The Breaking Of Nations: I Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods II Only thin smoke without flame |