Shaped like a fanciful, flying wing,
Of dark wood and bright string,
A beautiful though battered thing,
That never the softest breath stirred
But through its gold bones still was heard
The sorrow of a great, lost bird.

And when I played it I would kneel,
For when I touched it I could feel
Under my hands the sting and start
Of a naked, living, bleeding heart.

There was a mystery in my song,
Its trouble and beauty did not belong
To any thing that I had seen.

There were no words for the near, green
Snarled reality under my eyes,

No monotone for those smooth skies;
But rhythm out of the harp would be
Sucked up and broken over me;
And drenched and breathlessly my cries
Up from the fragments would arise
In love of a longing I named the sea!

But none who heard me understood
Nor seemed to find my singing good.
They told me only a mad fool
Could conjure up this crinkled, cool,
Level mirage and claim it true,
When anyone could see that blue
Was taut and brazen like the sky,
Or a hill, immovable and high
While water certainly stood sweet
Green in a circle at one's feet,

Or narrowed from rocks in white strips.
And as for whims like shells or ships-
They turned away and curled their lips!

Who would have dreamed that the king's son
Would be the first enkindled one

To listen and long, and wave his hand,
And turn his face from his father's land?
Then youth and youth flamed after him
To the dark height and over its rim,
Like star after vanishing star,

Till they wore a path as white as a scar!

Oh long and long the old men yearned

But the young men never returned—

So they cut off my hands and tongue and burned My harp. The tall, straight strings

Raveled and shriveled to thin black rings,
And the multicolored skeins of fire

That twisted up from the grey pyre,
Were the stained swords that put out my sight
Forever-

I had no light

A GARGOYLE IN FLANDERS

BY THEDA KENYON

When he who dared to dream of God's white face,

And carve it into stone,

Had finished, to surround his imagery,

A choir of angels, singing tirelessly,

And raised (as some new maker of high Heaven)
The whole, within this place--

The truer, baser nature of the man

Longed for an earth form-and my life began.

A bitter visaged gargoyle in a court
Looking forever with one jaded eye
Upon man's mad procession, passing by-
Gathering new impressions, day by day,
Storing them all away:

A fragile treasury of dreams and tears,

And gentle-winged hopes-and dark-eyed fears:
I whisper them to sunbeams that caress

My age-cramped, bent-limbed form;

And rambling roses, reaching up to bless
My grief, through sun and storm.

And far beneath, I watched the Pilgrims pass,
In penitential row;

Their pale, pure candles pointing to the sky,
Their meek eyes fixed upon the earth below-

Their incense, veiling all in mystery,

Offered to that hard-visaged marble God!

Then, when the little group had turned away,
Their sabots clicking on the cobblestones
In sharp rebuke to sunset silences—

And the cold, lofty God whom they had praised
Stared stonily, unmoved by their now fading mass.

Then, I knew the crash of battle, and the beating of the drum,
The screams of fallen wounded, and the high-flung Marseillaise,
The prayers of men now dying as they have died through the years,
The daring of the desperate, and the hollow word of praise-

And that pale marble face we knew as God's
Has fallen-crushed white marble-in the court;
The bleak-eyed angels ceased their silent songs
Long ere the last great Armageddon fought
Should sink into the splendor of the day-
And I-the lowliest of the company-
Reign undisturbed, in ugly majesty.

Are there no Gods that dare outlive the glow
Of sacrificial fire?

The sunbeam answers no—

Apollo and his cult passed long ago—

And thus the dim array of lesser Gods must go.

But wait-lo, reaching higher,

The rambler roses blow,

Their thorns a-tremble as they dare aspire,

And, blood-red drops on the grey wall, they grow
In crimson splendor like a living pyre-

They hear the poppies in the fields below,
Chanting in tireless ecstasy, and so

Though the most transient children of Desire,
They plumb the mysteries we tirelessly admire,
And in their moment's life, they dare-to know!

For a new company throngs through the place-
A stranger group, with bodies maimed like mine-
But their deep eyes are lit with light divine,
Their shattered limbs quiver with new-found grace;
And Holiness now steals within the court,

Soft-footed as a young girl's twilit prayer-
And wraps the reverent-headed company
In deep benevolent blessing, kneeling there!

THEDA KENYON.

PROGRESS OF THE WORLD

NEVER before did rival candidates for the Presidency so shrewdly characterize each other as did Senator Harding and Governor Cox; and never did they so promptly and completely confirm the estimates that had been made of them. "He is sincere," said Governor Cox of Senator Harding, on learning of his nomination. "He is smart," said Senator Harding of Governor Cox in the same circumstances. Those identical estimates were a thousand times repeated and elaborated, in reference to the speeches of acceptance. There were many-outside of his own partywho disagreed with Senator Harding, but there was not one who challenged the absolute sincerity of his utterances. Indeed, not a few went out of their way to pay him that highest of all tributes. That of Mr. Mark Sullivan in the New York Evening Post deserves repetition, because of the high authority of its author and of his indubitable impartiality:

You felt sure he had determined that there should be no false pretences. One felt sure that the country would see the sincerity in his speech; certainly the audience did. His greatest wish seemed to be that the country should understand his attitude clearly. There was not at any point the faintest evidence of straddle or of framing his utterances as an appeal to popularity. There were plenty of points with which the Democrats can take issue, but not anywhere was there a sentence that could be charged with disingenuousness.

The general comment upon Governor Cox's speech was that it was adroit, shrewd, smart; and there was the widest diversity of opinion as to precisely what he meant. Upon the one outstanding issue, however, he was explicit in spite of himself. That was, of course, the League of Nations. Upon that the writer whom we have already quoted declared that Senator Harding was "clear and unequivocal," as indeed he was: for American coöperation with other nations for the maintenance of peace on a basis of justice, to the