A1

Anonymous

NONYMOUS

nor needs a name

To tell the secret whence the flame,
With light, and warmth, and incense, came
A new creation to proclaim.

So was it when, His labor done,

God saw His work, and smiled thereon:

His glory in the picture shone,

But name upon the canvas, none.

LITTLE masters, hat in hand
Let me in your presence stand,
Till your silence solve for me
This your threefold mystery.

Tell me for I long to know
How, in darkness there below,
Was your fairy fabric spun,

Spread and fashioned, three in one.

Did your gossips gold and blue,
Sky and Sunshine, choose for you,
Ere your triple forms were seen,
Suited liveries of green?

236.

A Child's Prayer

MAKE me, dear Lord, polite and kind
To every one, I pray.

And may I ask you how you find
Yourself, dear Lord, to-day?

JOHN HENRY BONER

237. Poe's Cottage at Fordham

HERE lived the soul enchanted
By melody of song;

Here dwelt the spirit haunted

By a demoniac throng;

Here sang the lips elated;

Here grief and death were sated;

Here loved and here unmated
Was he, so frail, so strong.

Here wintry winds and cheerless
The dying firelight blew,
While he whose song was peerless

1845-1903

Dreamed the drear midnight through,

And from dull embers chilling
Crept shadows darkly filling
The silent place, and thrilling
His fancy as they grew.

Here, with brow bared to heaven,
In starry night he stood,
With the lost star of seven
Feeling sad brotherhood.

Here in the sobbing showers
Of dark autumnal hours

He heard suspected powers
Shriek through the stormy wood.

From visions of Apollo

And of Astarte's bliss, He gazed into the hollow And hopeless vale of Dis; And though earth were surrounded By heaven, it still was mounded With graves. His soul had sounded The dolorous abyss.

Proud, mad, but not defiant,

He touched at heaven and hell. Fate found a rare soul pliant And rung her changes well. Alternately his lyre, Stranded with strings of fire, Led earth's most happy choir, Or flashed with Israfel.

No singer of old story
Luting accustomed lays,
No harper for new glory,

No mendicant for praise,

He struck high chords and splendid,

Wherein were fiercely blended

Tones that unfinished ended

With his unfinished days.

Here through this lowly portal,
Made sacred by his name,
Unheralded immortal

The mortal went and came.

And fate that then denied him,
And envy that decried him,
And malice that belied him,

Have cenotaphed his fame.

JOSEPH I. C. CLARKE

1846-1925

238.

The Fighting Race

READ

EAD out the names!" and Burke sat back,
And Kelly drooped his head.

While Shea they call him Scholar Jack —
Went down the list of the dead.
Officers, seamen, gunners, marines,

The crews of the gig and yawl,

The bearded man and the lad in his teens,
Carpenters, coal passers-all.

Then, knocking the ashes from out his pipe,
Said Burke in an offhand way:

"We're all in that dead man's list, by Cripe!

Kelly and Burke and Shea."

"Well, here's to the Maine, and I'm sorry for Spain," Said Kelly and Burke and Shea.

"Wherever there's Kellys there's trouble," said Burke. "Wherever fighting's the game,

Or a spice of danger in grown man's work,"

Said Kelly, "you'll find my name."

"And do we fall short," said Burke, getting mad,

"When it's touch and go for life?

Said Shea, "It's thirty-odd years, bedad,

Since I charged to drum and fife