hear them? Have you read again, since the War, Gulliver's "Voyage to
the Houyhnhnms," or Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"? These men wrote,
whether in verse or prose, in the true spirit of poets; and Swift's
satire, which the text-book writers all tell you is so gross and
savage as to suggest the author's approaching madness, seems tender
and suave by comparison with what we know to-day.

Poetry is the log of man's fugitive castaway soul upon a doomed and
derelict planet. The minds of all men plod the same rough roads of
sense; and in spite of much knavery, all win at times "an ampler
ether, a diviner air." The great poets, our masters, speak out of
that clean freshness of perception. We hear their voices--

I there before thee, in the country that well thou knowest,
Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air.

So it is not vain, perhaps, to try clumsily to tell how this
delicious uneasiness first captured the spirit of one who, if not a
poet, is at least a lover of poetry. Thus he first looked beyond the
sunset; stood, if not on Parnassus, tiptoe upon a little hill. And
overhead a great wind was blowing.


[Illustration]



THE OLD RELIABLE