The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.

Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.

ARTHUR SYMONS.



Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked
question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by
others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All,
nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-
hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately,
and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a
problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my
town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern
outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am
interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion
may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a
problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,--peculiar
even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps