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magic or more simple effect than the author of these lines:

THE MARYLAND YELLOW-THROAT

While May bedecks the naked trees
With tassels and embroideries,
And many blue-eyed violets beam
Along the edges of the stream,
I hear a voice that seems to say,
Now near at hand, now far away,
Witchery-witchery-witchery !"

An incantation so serene,

So innocent, befits the scene;
There's magic in that small bird's note-
See, there he flits-the Yellow-throat;
A living sunbeam tipped with wings,
A spark of light that shines and sings
"Witchery-witchery-witchery!"

You prophet with a pleasant name,
If out of Mary-land you came,
You know the way that thither goes
Where Mary's lovely garden grows:
Fly swiftly back to her, I pray,
And try, to call her down this way,
Witchery-witchery-witchery!"

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In such work as this, simple, genuine, touched with true feeling, shaped with sincere art, the quality of a true singer comes out; and one cannot read these and kindred poems in this volume without the conviction that a real voice is speaking here. To say as much as this is to separate the writer of the volume at once from the throng of dexterous and imitative versifiers who crowd the ways of song; the vitality and range of his gift may be wisely and safely left to the future which will tax and test and deepen it.

The Academic Ode which gives its title to the volume is one of those rare occasional pieces which seem to have grown out of an event instead of being fitted to it. Lowell's Commemoration Ode, read at Harvard, and Stedman's Ode on Hawthorne, read at Dartmouth, belong in this category; and Dr. van Dyke's "Builders" will take its place with them among the poems which are likely long to survive the day on which they were recited. Dr. van Dyke is a true university. man; one, that is, who has assimilated the characteristic quality of the college

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tradition and life; he was, therefore, in the mood to discern the elements of spiritual interest, the elements susceptible of poetic treatment, in the Princeton celebration. He conceived his opportunity broadly and deeply, and he treated it with a kind of grave simplicity admirably fitted to express its lasting significance, and yet with touches of eloquent speech such as natural y belong to a verse structure of such proportions and dignity. A fine thought inspires the Ode and is wrought out with true freedom of hand.

A strong, courageous spirit, one gathers from all these books, finds its home in the heart of the man who wrote them; a mind well trained, ripened by culture, given to that continuous meditation which gets at the vital quality in knowledge and experience and grows by what it feeds on; an imagination sensitive, open, responsive; a gift of expression at once lucid, cogent, and winning; a born lover of Nature; and now, last of all, a true singer of Nature and life. A man so endowed owes his fellows all the inspiration, stimulus, vision, and delight which Henry van Dyke has given the world.

Parental Responsibility

By Lucy Elliot Keeler

HIS is a very simple story of a timid child; how she came by her faintheartedness, and how she left it behind; and of a mother whose own fear made her brave.

A great fright had come to the young wife, and the little girl received an inheritance of more than mortal timidity. Her first recollection is of fainting at the sight of a tall and unknown uncle coming to take her in his arms; and her second, of her breath seeming to fail when a loud ring came at the door. Every strange face, every unremembered form, every unusual noise, every animal unknown to the neighborhood, sent her pale and breathless to hide in the folds of her mother's skirts. But, great as were palpable terrors, those of the imagination harried her more. Overhearing some one read from a newspaper that a church floor had fallen through, every church service was thereafter one of patient waiting for inevitable

destruction; while an older schoolmate's composition on the ingenuities of the Inquisition was sufficient to fix her strained eyes on the walls of every unfamiliar room to discover the exact moment of their beginning to close upon her.

What could be done with such a little coward? Say Nonsense," and she would simply sit a little stiller, bite her lips a little harder, and suffer more intolerably. The mother was timid herself, and understood; but to allow the child to grow up in this attitude meant a life warped and self-centered, if not utterly ruined. The small brain was fast covering itself with creases of communication from one terror to another; and the mother, with beautiful acceptance of parental respons bility, began the task of obliterating the prenatal and inherited channels of thought and paralleling them with others of quite another character.

She started on the principle of the best

teachers, who never tell a pupil how a word ought not to be spelled, but always present it in its correct form. She never mentioned fear, but talked much of courage, and dwelt upon deeds of bravery culled from history, the newspapers, and the reports of the school-children. Visitors were kept waiting in the vestibule while guesses were made as to what favorite caller or what inviting store packages might be at hand, until the child was eager to satisfy her curiosity in the protecting wake of some elder going to the fearsome door. Bags of candy left in dark and distant rooms were offered to whoever would bring them, and when that exploit was attempted a door was left ajar and a voice raised in conversation that the small thing might know protecFavorite songs were kept for bedtime, when the mother courageously sat as far away as the foot of the stairs, or even the piano, singing in her cheeriest tones; and favorite reminiscences of a generation ago were reserved for those night hours when the child, whose very dreams were a terror, left her bed in search of comfort.

tion was near.

Thunder and lightning were made friends in another way. Drawings of the flashes, both in the forked variety familiar to the eye and the waved outlines revealed to the camera, were passed about, and the child hired to verify the different portrayals. Discords on the piano, followed by their resolutions, were applied to the thunderbolts, and the girl was gently taught to see how the air was cleared and cooled and the world made more lovely by the dreaded summer storm.

With advancing years and stature, the child was tempted forth at night ostensibly to take care of an older brother, and on family travels she was honored by being given charge of the checks and later of arrangements with hotel clerks and sleeping-car porters of fearful aspect. A cousin having been killed on a falling bridge, railroad viaducts were alarming to an extent that no familiarity seemed able to abate. "They frighten me, too," the mother once confessed, "but I always say, 'Into thy hands, Lord,' and then, without waiting to look out the window, I start down the aisle for a drink of water, and make a point of smiling at every little child on the way." That prescription

was, if not a cure, at least a sufficient distraction.

In those days, too, the girl's reason was oftener ap: ealed to in the work of regeneration. "I find for myself," the mother would say incidentally-oh, the grace and effectiveness of incidental instruction !— "that when I am frightened I must act at once. If I think burglars are at the windows, I jump up and get a light to satisfy myself; if an object in the dark makes me tremble, I drag my unwilling feet toward it, touch and examine it, and nearly always what seemed gigantic at a distance grows familiar when it is near.' The girl was also taught outdoor sports, for which she had naturally little inclination. Bravely her mother sent her forth to learn to row and shoot and skate and ride, that the woods and the waters might teach her hardihood and love of nature, quicken her wits, and make her courageously ready for emergencies.

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The story has gone far enough-perhaps too far-and it needs no Æsop come to moralize. If this child, predisposed to timidity, could grow through judicious care to be the opposite of the thing she was, so that the earth and its creatures, its solitude, its storms, and its midnights came to be a joy to her, what may not any mother, any teacher, accomplish with any child committed to her care? "Go wake the seeds of good asleep throughout the world," sang Browning; and again: The common problem, yours, mine, every one's, Is-not to fancy what were fair in life, Provided it could be-but, finding first What may be, then find how to make it fair Up to our means: a very different thing.

The Price

By William Canton

66

A man lived fifty years-joy dashed with tears; Loved, toiled; had wife and child, and lost

them; died;

And left of all his long life's work one little song. That lasted-nought beside.

Like the monk Felix's bird, that song was heard; Doubt prayed, Faith soared, Death smiled itself

to sleep;

That song saved souls. You say? The man paid stiffly? Nay.

God paid-and thought it cheap.
-The Chap-Book.

Not many months ago a slender volume came from the press of Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Co., of this city, presenting the work of a young negro, Mr. Paul Dunbar. This selection of verse, part of which had appeared in an earlier volume, was prefaced by a very friendly notice from the hand of Mr. Howells, whose delight it is to discover new writers and to put them in the way of finding their public. The face of the poet, as presented in the book, was of the pure negro type. His story, as briefly told, was that of a poor boy with very limited educational opportunities, who had had some schooling, and who had gone to work at an early age, taking charge of an elevator. The significance of the book lay in the fact that it was the first volume of its quality which had come from the hand of a negro. That race so far has suffered and borne rather than acted and spoken. It has been a silent race, its only expression being through those pathetic songs which thirty years ago interpreted for the first time to people at large the feeling and tradition of negro life on the great plantations. Mr. Dunbar belongs to a different generation, and expresses a different sentiment. The verse was not great, but it had, in the dialect poems at least, a certain individuality and homeliness of sentiment which challenged attention. Broad characterization, picturesqueness, a certain joyfulness of temperament, made themselves felt in all the verse relating to negro life. In presenting three poems written for The Outlook by Mr. Dunbar and one (the last) selected from his book, we give our readers an opportunity of forming their own estimate of the quality of his work.

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Den

you men's de mule's ol' ha'ness.
An' you men's de broken chair.
Hummin' all de time you's wukin'
Some ol' common kind o' air.
Evah now an' then you looks out,
Tryin' mighty ha'd to frown,
But you cain't, you's glad hit's rainin',
An' dey's time to tinker 'roun'.

Oh, you 'ten's lak you so anxious
Evah time it so't o' stops.
W'en hit goes on, den you reckon
Dat de wet 'll he'p de crops.
But hit ain't de crops you's aftah;
You knows we'n de rain comes down
Dat's hit's too wet out fu' wukin',
An' dey's time to tinker 'roun'.

Ob, dey's fun inside de co'n-crib,
An' dey's laffin' at de ba'n;
An' dey's allus some one jokin',
Er some one to tell a ya'n.

Dah's a quiet in yo' cabin,

Only fu' de rain's sof' soun'; So you's mighty blessed happy We'n dey's time to tinker 'roun'!

When de Co'n Pone's Hot

Dey is times in life when Nature
Seems to slip a cog an' go,
Jes' a rattlin' down creation,

Lak an ocean's overflow; When de worl' jes' stahts a-spinnin' Lak a picaninny's top, An' yo' cup o' joy is brimmin'

'Twel it seems about to slop. An' yo feel jes' lak a racah,

Dat is trainin' fu' to trot-
When yo' mammy ses de blessin'
An' de co'n pone's hot.

When you set down at de table,
Kin' o' weary lak an' sad,
An' you'se jes' a little tiahed
An' purhaps a little mad;
How yo' gloom tu'ns into gladness,
How yo' joy drives out de doubt
When de oven do' is opened,

An' de smell comes po'in' out;
Why, de 'lectric light o' Heaven

Seems to settle on de spot,
When yo' mammy ses de blessin'
An' de co'n pone's hct.

When de cabbage pot is steamin'
An' de bacon good an' fat,
When de chittlin's is a-sputter'n'
So's to show you whah dey's at,
Take away yo' sody biscuit,

Take away yo' cake an' pie,
Fu' de glory time is comin',
An' its 'proachin' very nigh,
An'

you want to jump an' hollah, Do' you know you'd bettah not, When yo' mammy ses de blessin'

An' de co'n pone's hot.

I have heerd o' lots o' sermons,
An' I've heerd o' lots o' prayers;
An' I've listened to some singin'
Dat has tuk me up de stairs

Of de Glory Lan' an' set me

Jes' below de Mahster's th'one
An' have lef' my hawt a-singin'
In a happy aftah tone.

But dem wu'ds so sweetly murmured
Seem to tech de softes' spot,
When my mammy ses de blessin',
An' de co'n pone's hot.

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