Their dead they call on in vain,
Quietly smiling and sleeping.

"Friends, now listen and hear,
Give over crying and grieving,
There shall come a day and a year
When the dead shall be as the living.

"There shall come a call, a foot-fall,
And the golden trumpeters blowing
Shall stir the dead with their call,
Bid them be rising and going.

"Then in the daffodil weather,
Lover shall run to lover;
Friends all trooping together;
Death and Winter be over.

"Laying my bulbs in the dark,
Visions have I of hereafter.
Lip to lip, breast to breast, hark!
No more weeping, but laughter!"

Yet this is no way to start your chapter, suggests Conscience. Why do you
not write an opening paragraph, for better for worse, instead of looking
out of the window and quoting Katharine Tynan? And then it flashes over
me, in lieu of answer, that I have just discovered one way of beginning
the chapter, after all! For what I should like to do in this book is to
set forth in decent prose some of the strange potencies of verse: its
power, for instance, to seize upon a physical image like that of a woman