the trumpeting "als Maximum" have met the heart's more lenient hosts in passionate conflict. We have not always agreed, Mr. Kreymborg and I, he leaning a trifle more luxuriously than I toward radicalism in verse which in this country as in the older art-civilization of Europe, has taken such a definite and engagingly unabashed position. But our amicable differences, our two attitudes, so frankly and unantagonistically merged, have surely added to the catholicism of our book. With the exception of William Vaughn Moody and Adelaide Crapsey who died within the last few years, and Emily Dickinson, contemporary of Walt Whitman, of whose genius little is know beyond her native land, all our poets are living to-day. And it is with proud satisfaction that I am able to record the immediate and sympathetic response of those poets and of their publishers.

I offer this anthology of American verse to the poets and poetrylovers of Germany, and to those other friends of "the sorrowful, great gift" into whose lands it may happily chance to wander. May it help to bring us all closer as only singing can.

What of the different tongues?

Mortar and brick of lovely words

Shall build a tower

Of light, exceeding power;

A singing Babel!

The wall

Will rock, as rocks the mother,

But will not fall.

What of the many tongues

That say or sing

In many ways

One living thing?

The poets shall lay the corner-stone,
Shall raise

The high wall higher still,

And strong;

Put dream to dream, as block to block,

Pile shouting song on song!

The lifting wall

Will rock,

Grow proud and tall.

What of the silent lands,
Silent too long?

Set them to music!

See, how the tower stands,

A trumpet at God's lips..

And in His shattering hour, Fortress will thunder song for song

From blossoming guns

No longer forged of fear

Or manned of hate;

Frontier will clasp frontier

With lovers' hands,

Stand breast to breast;

Hearts will grow great.

And in that hour

God's breath will fill the tower,

Will hold it manifest,

And straight!

Leonora Speyer

MORNING SONG OF SENLIN

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning

When the light drips through the shutters like the dew, I arise, I face the sunrise,

And do the things my fathers learned to do.

Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.
Vine leaves tap my window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.

It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And tie my tie once more.

While waves far off in a pale rose twilight
Crash on a white sand shore.

I stand by a mirror and comb my hair:
How small and white my face!-

The green earth tilts through a sphere of air

And bathes in a flame of space.

There are houses hanging above the stars

And stars hung under a sea...

And a sun far off in a shell of silence

Dapples my walls for me...

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
Should I not pause in the light to remember God?

Upright and firm I stand on a star unstable,

He is immense and lonely as a cloud.