* * * * *
They follow the stranger's plough, the slaves fare downwards.
He thanks God he is not in the place of the oppressor, and ends:
Thus 'twas done. The Lord wills it. Night sank o'er my people.
Our doom was sealed when the night had passed;
In the night I prayed to the Demon of Vengeance.
The first Beskydian bard and the last.
This poet is distinctly worth knowing. He is the truth where our
"red-bloods" and magazine socialists are usually a rather boresome pose.
As Mr. Selver has tried to make his anthology representative of all the
qualities and tendencies of contemporary Bohemian work it is not to be
supposed that they are all of the mettle of Bezruc.
One hears with deep regret that Vrchlicky is just dead, after a life of
unceasing activity. He has been a prime mover in the revival of the
Czech nationality and literature. He has given them, besides his own
work, an almost unbelievable number of translations from the foreign
classics, Dante, Schiller, Leopardi. For the rest I must refer the
reader to Mr. Selver's introduction.
_Ezra Pound_
"THE MUSIC OF THE HUMAN HEART"
This title-phrase has not been plucked from the spacious lawn of
_Bartlett's Familiar Quotations_. It grew in the agreeable midland yard
of Mr. Walt Mason's newspaper verse, and appeared in a tribute of his to
Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, whose fifty-ninth birthday anniversary,
falling on the seventh of October, has been widely celebrated in the
American public libraries and daily press.
Mr. Riley's fine gift to his public, the special happiness his genius
brings to his readers, cannot, for lack of space, be adequately
described, or even indicated, here. Perhaps a true, if incomplete,
impression of the beauty of his service may be conveyed by repeating a
well-known passage of Mr. Lowes Dickinson's _Letters from John
Chinaman_--a passage which I can never read without thinking very
gratefully of James Whitcomb Riley, and of what his art has done for
American poetry-readers.