How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
When those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?"


THE MAN WITH THE HOE.

"How will it be with kingdoms and with kings?" the "Man with the Hoe"
is answering in Russia this star-lit night and sun-illumined day. Yes,
Markham is prophet as well as poet. And to this humble writer's way of
reading poetry there were never four lines for pure poetry more
beautifully writ, neither across the seas, nor here at home, neither
east nor west, than these four from "Virgilia":

"Forget it not till the crowns are crumbled
And the swords of the kings are rent with rust;
Forget it not till the hills lie humbled,
And the springs of the seas run dust."
The Shoes of Happiness.

Prophetic? Yes! But ah, the music of it! Here rings and here sings
David the shepherd; the sweet lute, the harp, the wind in the trees,
the surge of the ocean-reef. It is music of a high and holy kind.

Which reminds me that I am to treat in this chapter on Markham only of
what he has written since 1906, the preceding period, best known
through his "Man with the Hoe," having been discussed by Dr. Downey in
the book heretofore mentioned. I have the joy-task in these brief lines