affectionately with our Southern Confederate soldiers, in the last
days of their hopeless struggle. His most famous lyric is an assertion
of the indomitable human will in the presence of adverse destiny. This
trumpet blast has awakened sympathetic echoes from all sorts and
conditions of men, although that creedless Christian, James Whitcomb
Riley, regarded it with genial contempt, thinking that the philosophy
it represented was not only futile, but dangerous, in that it ignored
the deepest facts of human life. He once asked to have the poem read
aloud to him, as he had forgotten its exact words, and when the reader
finished impressively

I am the Master of my fate:
I am the Captain of my soul--

"The _hell_ you are," said Riley with a laugh.

Henley is, of course, interesting not merely because of his paganism,
and robust worldliness; he had the poet's imagination and gift of
expression. He loved to take a familiar idea fixed in a familiar
phrase, and write a lovely musical variation on the theme. I do not
think he ever wrote anything more beautiful than his setting of the
phrase "Over the hills and far away," which appealed to his memory
much as the three words "Far-far-away" affected Tennyson. No one can
read this little masterpiece without that wonderful sense of melody
lingering in the mind after the voice of the singer is silent.

Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade
On desolate sea and lonely sand,
Out of the silence and the shade
What is the voice of strange command