real to him than a London fog. He never saw Greece with his natural
eyes. In the last year of his life, being asked by an American if he
had been much in Athens, he replied contritely, "Thou stick'st a
dagger in me." He belied Goethe's famous dictum.

John Masefield was born at Ledbury, in western England, in 1874. He
ran away from home, shipped as cabin boy on a sailing vessel, spent
some years before the mast, tramped on foot through various countries,
turned up in New York, worked in the old Columbia Hotel in Greenwich
Avenue, and had plenty of opportunity to study human nature in the
bar-room. Then he entered a carpet factory in the Bronx. But he was
the last man in the world to become a carpet knight. He bought a copy
of Chaucer's poems, stayed up till dawn reading it, and for the first
time was sure of his future occupation.

John Masefield is the real man-of-war-bird imagined by Walt Whitman.
He is the bird self-conscious, the wild bird plus the soul of the
poet.

To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane,
Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails,
Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,
At dusk that look'st on Senegal, at morn America,
That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,
In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul,
What joys! what joys were thine!

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great
waters, these see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.
They do indeed; they see them as the bird sees them, with no spiritual