And with mad fears and weakness of the mind
Brought thy gray hairs to shame.

We mourn thee, David Swing!

We who are young and urge the world ahead
Even if thou didst fling

With stern defiance thy devoted head
Against embuttressed bigotry. We stand
Where thou thyself hadst stood,

Wert thou now young again, intrepid, grand
And full of generous blood.

We mourn thee, David Swing!

We who, when thou art dead, begin to live,

We who begin to sing

When thou art silenced, we, the young forgive!
In thy youth's prime thou shouldst have gone away;
Death's summons came too late.

We recognize the power of age and pray:
Preserve us from like fate!

In a somewhat similar strain are two stanzas on "The Passing of Tennyson," prompted by feelings such as thousands of us felt when we read "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After."

III.

This volume, however, is not wholly given up to poems of progress and protest. There are many lines in which the sweetest sentiments blossom forth. Take, for example, this exquisite poem, entitled “I Love Thee":

Before thy coming, love of mine,

I had not known the light;
Thou camest like the glad sunshine
Unto the prisoner's sight.

The white glow of thy spirit shone

Into the dark depths of my own.

I dwell within the sunshine of thee;

Light of my life, I love thee, love thee!

Before thy coming, truly I

Knew joy but as a word,
As some fair, fabled butterfly
Of which I read or heard.
The happiness that in thee is
Tries my capacity for bliss.

I revel in the rapture of thee;

Joy of my heart, I love thee, love thee!

Before thy coming, life was all
And living it the whole;

Thy clearer vision pierced the pall,
Revealing me the soul.

Our one fear perished; mine thou art

Forever; we shall never part!

I shall have countless ages of thee;

Bride of my soul, I love thee, love thee!

Here, too are some beautiful lines called forth by the coming and going of the little daughter who became the idol of the poet and his devoted wife. This poem reminds me of those rare creations of Massey, "Babe Christabel" and "The Mother's Idol Broken'—not as in any sense imitative, but as embodying the same sentiment or poetic feeling:

She came like floods of sunshine

Between the gusts of rain,
Like stretches of sweet respite
Between the throbs of pain,
We never knew such joy before
Nor will we soon again.

She filled our hearts a-brimming
With tenderness and love,

Such as we had not dreamed of
Nor guessed the flavor of.

The few short months of her we prize
All other days above.

Like a bright revelation

She burst upon our earth;

We prize within our memories
The moment of her birth
And after she had come to us,
All else was little worth.

The days she tarried with us
With rapture we recall;

The day that we were parted
With bitterness of gall;

Yet this thought checks our grieving: "If
She had not been at all?"

Her day of life was better

Than never to have been,

And death is not so dreadful
As living long in sin.
Before death's awful mystery

We stand and peer therein.

The sun is not extinguished
Because a while withdrawn;

He seems to set at even,

Yet ever shines he on;

Thus we who sunned us in her light
Are waiting for the dawn;

Are waiting for the shadows

Which here from there divide,

To lift and let her love-light

Stream through the gateways wide.

A little child is leading us,

The little girl that died.

Mr. Dawson is a lover of Nature, and, though this volume is chiefly given to the songs of the human, there are some fine stanzas that

show how deeply the poet comes under the witching spell of Nature, a fact well illustrated in the following lines from a poem entitled "The Rock":

There is a grandeur in the immortal rocks,

An inborn majesty as of a god.

Their sullen, frowning brows and uncouth limbs

Are deeply furrowed by the dripping flow

Of waters as of tears, tears wrenched by force

From one who humbles pride to grudge them forth.
And over their uneven heads the moss
Spreads ever-verdant like a mat of hair.
Each season from their earth-filled crevices
The haughty pine and ghostly, white-stalked birch
And graceful hazel burst their various green.

Thus have the rocks a language; the faint stir
Of birds and insects, sough of trees which bed
Their roots into the fissures and which murmur
Unto the winds that woo them, gratefully.
They have their records, too; heiroglyphs
Of rents and seams and gulleys-magic runes
Which wise men may decipher and which tell
How oft this seeming-changelessness has changed.
And there are other records, futile signs

Of youths and maidens who upon the stone
Print names of rough initials dented in,

Intent to co-eternalize their fames
With the existence of the lasting rock.
Another speech they have-an undertone
Not vocal to the ear but to the soul
Which is the theme of nature's symphony
And easily attunes my spirit to its pitch
With subtlest harmony.

A number of dialect poems, which appear under the title of "Kickapoo River Ballads," further attest the author's versatility.

IV.

In many respects the most notable creation of the volume is the long poem which closes the book and which is called "Kismet: A Drama of the New Time." As the prologue suggests, the poem is fragmentary or suggestive rather than closely connected. It reminds one of a canvas in which certain scenes are brought out boldly and others are traced in outline or by a few suggestive strokes. The poem deals with a young man who in youth falls in love with a maiden of great beauty, but who, fearing lest he may be refused, even though her eyes have spoken love to him, fails to woo her and journeys to the west. She marries a millionaire whom she does not love. wanderer becomes a famous poet, and leaving a little wayside blossom-a simple, loving child of the West-who has learned to care for him, he returns to the East, meets his old love, and yields to passion's stormy voice. He persuades her to fly with him. She yields

The

after a struggle to his spell, and dies because life is intolerable when the light of day brings shame rather than joy. The poem is marked by strength, imagination, and subtlety of thought. It is a fine study in psychology, but perhaps the general reader will chiefly enjoy the truthbearing passages of beauty with which it abounds and of which the following are examples:

Love likes not gifts that cause the giver pain
And questions still:

"Is this thy pleasure, sweet? Say, once again:
Is this thy will?"

Sad are the souls that wait!

Sad they who lose what their hearts have won!
The fiercest agony under the sun

Is his who awakes too late!

Lust feeds on tears and gloats on agony;
He has no heart.

Love's temper melts at sorrow's plight and he
Drowns down his fires with sympathy
And doth depart.

More harsh than nature human customs are.
Whoso would fly

In custom's face, must ready be to war
And strong is he the struggle does not mar;
The weak must die.

I think there are few readers who will lay down the volume without regretting that the exacting demands of a busy life leave the poet so little time in which to weave truths, philosophy, and visions of beauty into verses that would sing themselves into the common life and become at once an inspiration and a monitor in crucial moments.

AN AMERICAN COMMONER: LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD PARKS BLAND. By William V. Byars. Illustrated. Cloth, 404 pp. Price, $3.50. Columbus, Mo.: E. W. Stephens, publisher.

This work by William V. Byars is a volume of vital interest to those who would follow our political history during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Mr. Bland was one of the few thoroughly incorruptible and fearless patriots who occupied a large place in public life at Washington. He stood for the old ideas of freedom and justice which are in such disrepute under the present trust-ridden and empire-drunken Administration. He was a friend of the common people, a champion of the wealth-creators, and a son of freedom. His life is worthy of careful study and in the hands of the brilliant and scholarly biographer it possesses the interest that only attaches to volumes where the authors are en rapport with the subject and the

principles for which he stood. Young men on the threshold of life especially should peruse this work. It will not only make them better and truer, but it will be to their moral natures what a bracing mountain air is to the physical body of one enervated by long residence in a malarial swamp. As an antidote to the sophistry and twaddle of apologists for the present un-American Administration, and for the immoral domination of the trusts in public, commercial, and industrial life, this work is unsurpassed.

MATTHEW DOYLE. By Will Garland. Cloth, 282 pp. Price, $1.50. New York: G. W. Dillingham Company.

"Matthew Doyle" is a novel of Southern life written by the son of ex-Attorney-General Garland. It discusses several present-day problems of special interest to Southern readers, such as the negro problem and lynching. Perhaps the best part of the work is the author's description of the evil effects on the ignorant and newly-freed negroes of Northern politicians who at the close of the war appeared all over the South, largely for the purpose of profiting by the votes of the black man. The following extracts will serve to give the reader a fair idea of Mr. Garland's treatment of this subject:

"Then there appeared in the horizon a speck. Like all other incipient storm-clouds, it was small-no larger than a carpet-bag; and, in fact, as its proportions became defined, it was a carpet-bag. Like all other storm clouds, it quickly gathered other carpet-bags, until the South was like unto a plague-stricken Egypt. A land but lately bayonet-ridden was now carpet-bag deluged, and the latter will be by far the worst calamity. The highways and byways, and all the other ways, were infested with gentry who, not being able to accumulate more than a carpet-bagful of chattels North, were obviously competent to do so South.

"Then, indeed, did the freedman hear some truths. ... Then, indeed, were 'marster's' folks held up to him as his worst and most implacable enemies. Then, indeed, was it demonstrated to him that Nature had accomplished for the Ethiopian by a partizan vote what she hasn't yet completed for the Caucasian by evolution. Then, indeed, did his new-found mentors whisper boss in his ear, ballot in his skull, and bullet in his heart. What happened? When power is the highest aim of the white man's game; when we fall every day, prone and prostrate before the gewgaws of garishness, is it inexplicable that 'Pedro's' people wavered?

"After the carpet-bags had permeated the erstwhile poor but placid problem, 'Pedro' began to absorb the imported doctrine with spongelike avidity. 'Pedro,' being by genius imitative, was correlatively absorbent. He scampered into the city-not with any idea of working, for he had been told that, as a ward of the nation, he needn't work. Consequently, he neglected the faculties necessary to industry and improved those essential to idleness.

"He was young then, and bright, too; quick to see and quicker to note. He saw that 'marster' no longer went down into a wellfilled wallet-carpet-bags were fat instead. He swung to the latter. 'Pedro' experienced some halcyon days thereabouts. Vice was unrolled