'You ain't.'

'I am.'

'I'll fight you for it.'
'Right, by damn.""

We could never tolerate many lines like these even in a long narrative poem. And one of the delights in reading "The Everlasting Mercy" is a delight in the freshness and variety of the words used from page to page. Another passage quite as true racially, and quite as true to the character of Saul in one of his nobler moods, is the passage that describes the love of running light-foot and swift along a country road at night.

"The men who don't know to the root

The joy of being swift of foot

Have never known divine and fresh

The glory of the gift of flesh,
Nor felt the feet exult, nor gone
Along a dim road, on and on,
Knowing again the bursting glows,
The mating hare in April knows,
Who tingles to the pads with mirth

At being the swiftest thing on earth."

This passage is in keeping with that great passage from Browning's "Saul" that begins "How good is man's life, the mere living."

Just as good in its own way is the diction of the passage that tells how Saul amused little Jimmy Jaggard with fairy tales about Tom-cats and mouse-meat. And, in the end, the poem's language reaches into a beauty that means the redemption of the sinner. The racial quality is not lost. The man's class and character are not lost. But he is fulfilled in his own kind. All. the words that are used show the fulfillment. It is the homely salvation of the humble.

"All earthly things that blessed morning
Were everlasting joy and warning.

The gate was Jesus' way made plain,
The mole was Satan foiled again,
Black blinded Satan snouting way
Along the red of Adam's clay;
The mist was error and damnation,
The lane the road unto salvation.
Out of the mist into the light,
O blessed gift of inner sight.
The past was faded like a dream;
There came the jingling of a team,
A ploughman's voice, a clink of chain,
Slow hoofs, and harness under strain.
Up the slow slope a team came bowing,
Old Callow at his autumn ploughing,
Old Callow, stooped above the hales,
Ploughing the stubble into wales.
His grave eyes looking straight ahead,
Shearing a long straight furrow red;
His plough-foot high to give it earth
To bring new food for men to birth.
O wet red swathe of earth laid bare,
O truth, O strength, O gleaming share,
O patient eyes that watch the goal,
O ploughman of the sinner's soul.

O Jesus, drive the coulter deep

To plough my living man from sleep."

The wisdom used in choosing these words, the utter naturalness of them, is something that is too good to be conspicuous and will be discovered only by those who read the poem more than once and think about it quietly. One line alone for truth and vitality would make this passage memorable,—

"Up the slow slope a team came bowing."

Who that has ever seen ploughing will deny the truth of these words? Almost equally good are the lines,

"His grave eyes looking straight ahead,
Shearing a long straight furrow red;
His plough-foot high to give it earth."

It is hardly necessary to speak of the grave, strong symbolism of many parts of this passage, for that is something that any reader will feel.

Another narrative poem in which the use of words can be studied to good advantage is "Hoops," by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. Mr. Gibson's work differs from Mr. Masefield's in that he does not attempt to use just the words that his characters would have spoken. He uses the words that their souls might have spoken if their lips had learned them. For that reason his diction, beautiful and austere though it is, at times seems to take his characters far away from us as real, living men and women, capable of reserves and intimacies, and leave them with us only as spirits speaking through Mr. Gibson. In "Hoops,” for example, we find a circus clown and a tender of camels talking together on the ground near the entrance of the circus tent. The clown is Merry Andrew. The tender of camels is Gentleman John. What they say to each other has genuine importance as the speech of two souls revealing themselves. In it is wisdom, a sense of values in life, a sense of beauty and of ugliness, and of the characters shown in beasts and persons. But all of these things belong to Mr. Gibson, the poet, and are felt as belonging to him. They may belong to the souls of Merry Andrew and Gentleman John, but they do not belong on their lips in the words that Mr. Gibson has chosen. Says Gentleman John:

"And then consider camels: only think

Of camels long enough, and you'ld go mad—
With all their humps and lumps; their knobbly knees,
Splay feet and straddle legs; their sagging necks,

Flat flanks and scraggy tails, and monstrous teeth."

That is an admirable description of a camel, somewhat too admirable, perhaps, for the mouth of Gentleman John, a little too clever with its play of double consonants and short "a" sounds from line to line, even though Mr. Gibson does tell us later— perhaps to explain Gentleman John's gift of words-that Gentleman John wanted to be a poet. Still more admirable as Mr.