them--it does not look like a future at all. More ballad-concerts, more
quaint English, more robustious barytone songs, more piecemeal pictures,
more colonial poetry, more young nations with withered traditions. Yet
it is before this prospect that the provincial overseas lifts up his
voice in a boast or a promise common enough among the incapable young,
but pardonable only in senility. He promises the world a literature, an
art, that shall be new because his forest is untracked and his town just
built. But what the newness is to be he cannot tell. Certain words were
dreadful once in the mouth of desperate old age. Dreadful and pitiable
as the threat of an impotent king, what shall we name them when they are
the promise of an impotent people? "I will do such things: what they are
yet I know not."




THE SPIRIT OF PLACE


With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have
all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too much
interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible
utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird,
is a musician pestered with literature.

To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence. You cannot shake together
a nightingale's notes, or strike or drive them into haste, nor can you
make a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your turn, whereas
wedding-bells are compelled to seem gay by mere movement and hustling. I
have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole