And all that niceness would forbid,
Superb, she smiled upon and did.

Let other girls, whose happier days
Preserve the perfume of their ways,

Go modestly. The passing hour
Adds splendor to their opening flower.

But from this child too swift a doom
Must steal her prettiness and bloom,

Toil and weariness hide the grace
That pleads a moment from her face.

So blame her not if for a day
She flaunts her glories while she may.

She half perceives, half understands, Snatching her gifts with both her hands.

The little strut beneath the skirt
That lags neglected in the dirt,

The indolent swagger down the street-
Who can condemn such happy feet!

Innocent! vulgar—that's the truth!
But with the darling wiles of youth!

The bright, self-conscious eyes that stare With such hauteur, beneath such hair! Perhaps the men will find me fair!

Charming and charmed, flippant, arrayed, Fluttered and foolish, proud, displayed, Infinite pathos of parade!

The bangles and the narrowed waist

The tinseled boa-forgive the taste!

Oh, the starved nights she gave for that, And bartered bread to buy her hat!

She flows before the reproachful sage
And begs her woman's heritage.

Dear child, with the defiant eyes,
Insolent with the half surmise

We do not quite admire, I know
How foresight frowns on this vain show!

And judgment, wearily sad, may see
No grace in such frivolity.

Yet which of us was ever bold

To worship Beauty, hungry and cold!

Scorn famine down, proudly expressed
Apostle to what things are best.

Let him who starves to buy the food
For his soul's comfort find her good,

Nor chide the frills and furbelows
That are the prettiest things she knows.

Poet and prophet in God's eyes
Make no more perfect sacrifice.

Who knows before what inner shrine She eats with them the bread and wine?

Poor waif! One of the sacred few
That madly sought the best they knew!

Dear let me lean my cheek to-night Close, close to yours. Ah, that is right.

How warm and near! At last I see
One beauty shines for thee and me.

So let us love and understand-
Whose hearts are hidden in God's hand.

And we will cherish your brief Spring
And all its fragile flowering.

God loves all prettiness, and on this
Surely his angels lay their kiss.

Anna Hempstead Branch [18

SATURDAY NIGHT

THE lights of Saturday night beat golden, golden over the pillared street;

The long plate-glass of a Dream-World olden is as the footlights shining sweet.

Street-lamp-flambeau-glamor of trolley-comet-trail of the trains above,

Splash where the jostling crowds are jolly with echoing laughter and human love.

This is the City of the Enchanted, and these are her Enchanted People;

Far and far is Daylight, haunted with whistle of mill and bell of steeple.

The Eastern tenements loose the women, the Western flats release the wives

To touch, where all the ways are common, a glory to their sweated lives.

The leather of shoes in the brilliant casement sheds a luster over the heart;

The high-heaped fruit in the flaring basement glows with the tints of Turner's art.

Darwin's dream and the eye of Spencer saw not such a gloried race

As here, in copper light intenser than desert sun, glides face by face.

The drab washwoman dazed and breathless, ray-chiseled in the golden stream,

Is a magic statue standing deathless-her tub and soap-suds touched with Dream.

+

Yea, in this people, glamor-sunnied, democracy wins heaven

again;

Here the unlearned and the unmoneyed laugh in the lights of Lover's Lane!

O Dream-World lights that lift through the ether millions of miles to the Milky Way!

To-night Earth rolls through a golden weather that lights the Pleiades where they play!

Yet ... God? Does he lead these sons and daughters? Yea, do they feel with a passion that stills,

God on the face of the moving waters, God in the quiet of the hills?

Yet . . . what if the million-mantled mountains, and what if the million-moving sea

Are here alone in façades and fountains-our deep stoneworld of humanity

We builders of cities and civilizations walled away from the sea and the sod

Must reach, dream-led, for our revelations through one another-as far as God.

Through one another-through one another-no more the gleam on sea or land

But so close that we see the Brother-and understand-and understand!

Till, drawn in swept crowd closer, closer, we see the gleam in the human clod,

And clerk and foreman, peddler and grocer, are in our Family of God!

James Oppenheim [1882

THE BARREL-ORGAN

THERE'S a barrel-organ caroling across a golden street,

In the City as the sun sinks low;

And the music's not immortal; but the world has made it

sweet

And fulfilled it with the sunset glow;

And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain

That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light;

And they've given it a glory and a part to play again

In the Symphony that rules the day and night.

And now it's marching onward through the realms of old romance,

And trolling out a fond familiar tune,

And now it's roaring cannon down to fight the King of France,

And now it's prattling softly to the moon,

And all around the organ there's a sea without a shore

Of human joys and wonders and regrets;

To remember and to recompense the music evermore
For what the cold machinery forgets.

Yes; as the music changes,

Like a prismatic glass,

It takes the light and ranges

Through all the moods that pass;
Dissects the common carnival

Of passions and regrets,

And gives the world a glimpse of all
The colors it forgets.

And there La Traviata sighs

Another sadder song;

And there Il Trovatore cries

A tale of deeper wrong;

And bolder knights to battle go

With sword and shield and lance,

Than ever here on earth below

Have whirled into-a dance !—

Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time; Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!) And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer's wonderland;

Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)