Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches;

And so I dream of going back to be.

It's when I'm weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

FRAGMENTARY BLUE

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird or butterfly
Or flower or wearing-stone or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet) —
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

THE ONSET

Always the same when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long-
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,-
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who, overtaken by the end,
Gives up his errand and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won
More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:

I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed; the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured against maple, birch and oak;
It cannot check the Peeper's silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender April rill

That flashes tail through last year's withered brake
And dead weeds like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch
And there a clump of houses with a church.

William Ellery Leonard was born at Plainfield, New Jersey, January 25, 1876. He received his A.M. at Harvard in 1899 and completed his studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn. After traveling for several years throughout Europe, he became a teacher and has been professor of English in the University of Wisconsin since 1906.

The Vaunt of Man (1912) is Leonard's most representative volume. Traditional in form and material, it is anything but conservative in spirit. Leonard's insurrectionary fervor speaks sonorously in the simplest of his quatrains and the strictest of his sonnets. This protesting passion is given an even wider sweep in The Lynching Bee (1920), the title-poem being a terrific indictment in which the poet's outrage speaks with a new ironism.

Besides his original poetry, Leonard has published several volumes of translations from the Greek and Latin as well as a series of paraphrases of the fables of Æsop.

THE IMAGE OF DELIGHT

O how came I that loved stars, moon, and flame,
And unimaginable wind and sea,

All inner shrines and temples of the free,
Legends and hopes and golden books of fame;
I that upon the mountain carved my name
With cliffs and clouds and eagles over me,
O how came I to stoop to loving thee-
I that had never stooped before to shame?

O'twas not thee! Too eager of a white
Far beauty and a voice to answer mine,
Myself I built an image of delight,
Which all one purple day I deemed divine-

And when it vanished in the fiery night,
I lost not thee, nor any shape of thine.

TO THE VICTOR

Man's mind is larger than his brow of tears;
This hour is not my all of time; this place
My all of earth; nor this obscene disgrace
My all of life; and thy complacent sneers
Shall not pronounce my doom to my compeers
While the Hereafter lights me in the face,
And from the Past, as from the mountain's base,
Rise, as I rise, the long tumultuous cheers.

And who slays me must overcome a world:
Heroes at arms, and virgins who became
Mothers of children, prophecy and song;
Walls of old cities with their flags unfurled;
Peaks, headlands, ocean and its isles of fame-
And sun and moon and all that made me strong!

Sarah N. Cleghorn

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn was born at Norfolk, Virginia, February 4, 1876. She came North early in her youth and was graduated from Burr and Burton Seminary in Manchester, Vermont (in 1895), in which town, after a year at Radcliffe, she has lived ever since.

An ardent worker for lost causes, Miss Cleghorn's fiery spirit shines through Portraits and Protests (1917), the first half of which is coolly descriptive and the second half, hotly insurrectionary verse.

66

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

The unfit die: the fit both live and thrive." Alas, who say so?-They who do survive.

So when her bonfires lighted hill and plain, Did Bloody Mary think on Lady Jane.

So Russia thought of Finland, while her heel Fell heavier on the prostrate commonweal.

So Booth of Lincoln thought: and so the High Priests let Barabbas live, and Jesus die.

THE INCENTIVE

I saw a sickly cellar plant

Droop on its feeble stem, for want
Of sun and wind and rain and dew—
Of freedom!-Then a man came through
The cellar, and I heard him say,

"Poor, foolish plant, by all means stay
Contented here: for-know you not?-
This stagnant dampness, mould and rot
Are your incentive to grow tall
And reach that sunbeam on the wall."
-Even as he spoke, the sun's one spark
Withdrew, and left the dusk more dark.