"Dr. Brooke"--she interrupted quickly and sent an alert glance about to see that no customers had entered and were eavesdropping "Dr. Brooke was knowing no more about it than was myself."

I sat down relieved. "Well-what has happened to the Merryweathers?"

""Tis hardly ever you'll be seeing them again. 'Tis that they packed up, bag and baggage, a week gone this Monday, and left town without so much as bidding one of us farewell."

"What was the reason?"

Mrs. O'Herron's shoulders rose expressively, though not a bit in character with her nationality. "No reason was given. "Tis myself that has suspicions, though." "Really! What are they?"

""Tis not me they'll be saying was after telling it."

Of course she knows; she knows everything; besides, she has been the spectator many times before of similar affairs. I wager she could tell you the minute one

of them began. She could do more than that, dangerous woman-she could tell you each day how things were progressing.

I looked at her with a smile meant to say that I was in the secret too. She refused to notice it and returned to the tomato-tins.

"I know much more about it than you do, Mrs. O'Herron."

"Many's the time I've heard 'em talk. like yourself. What do you know, then?" "Tis not me they'll be saying was after telling it!"

"Sure and he thinks he's fooling me." "I can give you the password.” "Bless you, then; out with it!" "White socks."

Since that moment she has treated me as a man worthy of her respect.

"I don't know, though," I admitted, "how she got hold of them."

She came nearer confidentially. "No more do I."

"Let's find out, Mrs. O'Herron."

She sat down beside me confidingly. "Let's. But how are we going about it when himself, the dear doctor, doesn't even know she's been darning them for him."

"How do you know that?"

"Twas only this morning he was here to see Patrick, and while he was sitting beside his bed I took pains to comment on how well his socks were darned."

"Did he blush and stammer?"

"Bless you, no. He took it as cool as a cucumber. Said Dinah did them very nicely when she didn't use black thread." "And you believed him?"

She looked at me out of half-hurt, halfangry eyes. "Don't you?"

I sighed and had to admit that I did.

Τ

The "New Poetry"

HE present very general interest in poetry, and particularly the poetry of the day and the hour, must cause many a casual reader to ponder the question, "What is poetry?" To the lover of the art, confronted by many diverse and perplexing theories and performances, this question has become almost a challenge. Now, while this, like most of the rudimentary problems that baffle the mind, must remain imperfectly solved in any ultimate fashion, there is always the hope that the unprejudiced exercise of common sense and the reaction of certain instincts (for the passion for beauty is assuredly an instinct, if not a universally conscious one) may illumine the simplest outlines of a reality much beclouded by purely intellectual conceptions. The "new poetry" has become the watchword of a general tendency, and yet this tendency makes itself felt in many varied, even conflicting, forms and methods of approach. There is, moreover, something a little disturbing about the phrase so confidently and specifically applied. Surely, all true poetry is new, whether it was chanted to the lyre of the Greeks or typewritten amidst the walls and sky-scrapers of Manhattan and Chicago. The singing heart of man always takes us by surprise whenever it successfully expresses its own, and therefore our own, sincere emotion. In the profound sense all experience of reality is new. Sorrow and love and death, howsoever often relived by the millions that have peopled and people the earth, must be felt again by each of us and all who shall be after us, and come ever as fresh revelations to each individual-as something infinitely strange and overwhelming whenever thus refelt, whenever thus relived. It is not sufficient that they be apprehended or the idea of them intellectually conveyed, they must be experienced; and it is exactly this experience that true poetry, as well as life, affords. Poetry offers us a universal range of experience exceeding the limits of our individual and often accidental destiny,

and in a manner complements the broken circle of our opportunities: such experience of reality in the life of the flesh, or of poetry, is always new. We are not now, of course, speaking of the purely literary echoes of past living utterances, which, indeed, offer no experience to the feeling soul, but merely convey again an idea, or a form, intellectually conceived and therefore only intellectually apprehended. We are not now speaking of this so-called "poetry."

Perhaps the phrase the "new poetry" is intended to attach to an outward quality rather than to an inward spirit. There can be little doubt that the leading exponents of the movement have rendered literature a service in their insistence upon a certain concise clarity and concrete structure of image, the elimination of vague generalities and impressionistic confusion of outline, the effort toward presentation rather than description, and, above all, in their longing to get away from the rhetorical, the literary and "poetic," back to the living, breathing speech which lies at the heart of every day, and which, with its innumerable human inflections and connotations, bears a so much more vital relation to reality. Such a return to the racy, tingling language of normal utterance is as shocking and invigorating as a cold plunge into the waters of a great sea, and may well be a tonic as periodically needful to the body of any literature, but it is essentially the return that has been made afresh by every great poet from the day when Dante began to write in his "dear common tongue" to the time of Wordsworth and his poetry of familiar things in the language of familiar speech.

When we come to the emphasis, more vehemently stressed by the less significant if more vociferous members of the group— the emphasis upon expression in the freeverse forms, and the less rhythmic freeverse forms at that-the problem becomes a more puzzling one. Why this unusual insistence upon purely external character, upon the physical shape and body of emo

tion? Most assuredly some poetry must embody its soul in this form, but just as certainly another poetry, another complex of ideas and feelings, must manifest itself in the highly rhythmical and more familiar shape of the stanza or strophe. The feeling creates its own form-body, which is but the outward and inevitable gesture, so to speak, of an inward necessity; and just because the medium of free verse is the natural and necessary expression of a certain subjective, it does not follow that the more artificial modes are unsuited to the embodiment of other impulses. Indeed, they, too, of necessity, thus articulate themselves in accordance with their nature; nor can we believe that the followers of the new cult would so confess the meagreness and monotony of their own range of emotion as to limit its expression to any one verse pattern.

Then there is the matter of rhyme, which, in spite of Milton's attack upon it as “the invention of a barbarous age," has remained one of the most subtle and magical of agents in certain forms of verse. There has been much heard of late to the effect that rhyme is a mere jingle, a tawdry ornament tagged on at the end of each line for the delight of the childish, or as a sort of somnolent tinkling to lull the ear of those who have come to think of poetry as little else and who thus chiefly distinguish it from the larger rhythms of prose. It has recently even been defended as a kind of hypnotic measure tending to induce in the listener the trance of ecstasy toward which all poetry would lift us; yet both accusation and defense seem to fall far short of any reasonable explanation of its undeniably potent effect.

In the stricter verse forms there are, rhythmically speaking, two elements of delight: the metrical pattern of the stanza, or unit, and the varying waves of the sentence and thought rhythm within that pattern. These rhythms are eternally in conflict and at the same time in harmony with the larger pattern; periodically in conflict. and ultimately in harmony, they ebb and flow elastically within the rigid form, running over here, lapsing and falling short there, but always eventually terminating in strict accordance with the metrical stride of the unit. This harmonious conflict of rhythms permits of the greatest richness of effect, analogous in many ways to syncopation in music, and it is the rhyme, ceaselessly accentuating the recurrence of the ruling

rhythm, that compels the ear to follow the intricacies of this delicious interior struggle. It thus occupies the position of the bar in music, and where the sense flows on into the following line indicates the turn of the metrical tide. Swinburne has written: "Come back in dreams, for in the life

Where thou art not

We find none like thee. Time and strife And the world's lot

Move thee no more, but love at least

And loyal heart

May move thee, royal and released

Soul that thou art."

And if by a murderous assault we remove the rhymes and get:

"Come back in dreams, for in the life

Where thou art not

We find none like thee. Time and change And the world's doom

Move thee no more, but love, perhaps,

And loyal faith

May move thee, royal and released

Soul that thou art,"

the sense of the superb conflict of rhythms within rhythm is lost to the ear, as the vacuity of the music readily testifies.

Perhaps this matter of rhyme will help to prove the barrenness of theories where beauty is concerned; and some of the new poets are distinguished for the number and fervor of their theories and the careful manner in which their work is based upon a preconceived intellectual formula. In art and morals theories and protestations count for little, and it is performance alone that can convince us. The intellectual part of man would seem to be but a small and irritable segment of him at best, the greater part of him, like an iceberg, lying submerged below the surface of the conscious. It is there that instinct recognizes her first love, beauty, by some infallible law-beauty, the secret of which not all the conscious cells of the cortex can fathom or formulate.

sion, to cast off a certain passionate illusionment and approach the universe as it actually is the universe of science, perhaps, rather than that of the thrilled human heart. This is the kernel of the entire new movement, as has already been clearly pointed out by several writers on the subject. Everywhere in the new verse we are conscious of a certain objective quality, not the objective quality of "The Divine Comedy" or "Faust," which is achieved by the symbolic representation in external forms of inner spiritual verities, but an often stark objectivity accomplished by the elimination of the feeling human medium, the often complete absence of any personal reaction. We are shown countless objects and movements, and these objects and movements are glimpsed panoramically from the point of view of color, outline, and interrelation, as through the senses merely; the transfiguring lens of the soul is seldom interposed or felt to be present. To the "new poet" the city street presents itself in terms of a series of sense-impressions vividly realized, a succession of apparently aimless and kaleidoscopic pageantries stripped of their human significance and symbolic import. They have ceased to be signs of a less outward reality, they have become that reality itself-reality apprehended from a singly sensuous standpoint untainted by any of the human emotions of triumph or sorrow, pity or adoration. Love is thus frequently bared of its glamour and death of its peculiar majesty, which may now be regarded as deceitful and fatuous projections of the credulous soul, and not to be tolerated by the sophisticated mood of the new and scientific poet, for it is exactly with these beautiful "sentimentalities" that the analytic mind of science is not concerned.

Some of the "new poets" have fallen out of love with reality and therefore no longer understand it. It is as if the heart of man had grown weary of its long and unrewarded idealism and had determined to touch the quick of disillusionment. "Let us rhapsodize and romanticize about life no longer," it says, "nor believe it to be any more than it is, which is not so much at best! Let us throw off the yoke of these ecstasies, the cajolery of these comforting illusions, and in the mood of science, fearless and unappeased, lay bare the face of truth!"

There is a great courage in this attitude

which would more wholly win our admiration if an equal love, an equal faith, kept pace with it; and yet many of us cannot feel that it is the real truth that is thus attained. Many of us must feel that science grasps but a fragment of the truth-that the longings, imaginings, and even fondest aspirations of the fragile human heart have their guarantees in reality, nay, are elements of that reality itself; and that the splendor which the soul casts over the fact is but a keener appreciation of its intrinsic value. Such must believe that the truth of things is only glimpsed in moments of the highest enthusiasm and exaltation, that it is hard to hold this truest vision of reality, even impossible for any great stretch of time; and that in disillusionment, in all the petty moods of critical analysis, we sink away from, and not nearer to, the real fact. The truth is only attained to, and by effort— it is not evident to the cold or the relaxed mind. It is we who are insipid and dull, and not the divine reality whose beauty and splendor, whose fulness, we are too uninspired to grasp in most of the low, familiar moments of life. We must believe that it is to the lover in the moment of his love that the true knowledge of the object is vouchsafed even more fully than to the scientist.

Only the lover understands, and the poet is the great lover. It is his function to awake and keep alive in others this clearest vision of reality granted to him through his love. Each new period of life, each new present, with its often crude and repellent exterior, its apparently unlovely jumble of materials and events, is at once his challenge and his opportunity. The new world of each to-day, like a fallow field, awaits his tillage, that it may bear to others all that sleeps within it in seed and silence. The poet is to show us "things as they are," but let him not forget all that this implies, nor let him cease from seeing with the keen and infallible eye of ecstatic love. Art is a revelation, not a mere reproduction. The real must be "poetized"—that is, it must be revealed again for what it is to those who have forgotten-for the real is beautiful, the real is poetry, and he is here to bear witness to that fact. This is the truth from which no weariness, no disillusionment, should be allowed to beat him back. It is the whole truth of which all lesser moods are but the fragments.

F

CHINESE GARDENS

ROM time immemorial China has been called the Flowery Kingdom, a name given by the Chinese themselves and singularly suited to the land which for ages was like an oasis of flowers of the spirit in the world desert of barbarism. In this oasis grew the arts of the bronze and stone worker, of the silk-maker and embroiderer, of the potter, of the painter on silk, of the poet, philosopher, and ethical devotee. But China was not named the Flowery Kingdom because of these flowers of the mind. Her flora is one of the most luxuriant in the world. It is estimated to consist of some twelve thousand species, nine thousand of which are known and one-half of which are indigenous and not found elsewhere.

Such being the flora of China, it is readily understood that horticulture and gardening early became a skilled and honored profession.

The Emperor Shön-nung (2737-2705 B. C.) known as the "Divine Laborer," and also as the Father of Medicine and Husbandry, despatched collectors to all parts of the empire to bring in plants of economic or medicinal value for cultivation in the imperial gardens. We have more detailed information in regard to the horticulture and gardening carried on by the Emperor Wu Ti (140-86 B. C.), whose agents brought from

distant parts many plants that have been identified.

Combined with this luxuriant flora China abounds in natural landscape beauty, lakes, rivers, waterfalls, and grand and extraordinary mountain shapes and mountain scenery. The Chinese word for a landscape painting means "mountain-water picture." In their painting they were pre-eminent in landscape and in the portrayal of flowers, attaining a standard not yet reached by us, and revealing a philosophy, a religion, of kinship with nature which is only beginning to arise in the Western soul.

The painter Kuo Hsi said in the eleventh century: "Why do men love landscape? In his very nature man loves to be in a garden with hills and streams, whose water makes exhilarating music as it ripples among the stones." The flower-painting of China had the importance of figure-painting with us.

This love of nature as revealed in the writing of their poets and philosophers, and in their paintings, found expression also in their gardens.

In all their great art there was suggestion-suggestion of man's oneness with nature, suggestion of man's reaching out to the infinite, suggestion of a living cosmic spirit pervading natural things as well as man.