of world-wide culture, with the genius for teaching, may be found, though not in endless abundance, nor by all who might start upon their trail. But will they and their work receive due welcome?

The true-hearted scholar will certainly not accept mere wealth as a badge of mastery or superiority. He will neither envy those who dwell in palaces, give costly banquets, or otherwise display the pride of successful moneygetting, nor will he ever cringe for a share in the profits of traders or speculators. These chose after their desires. His heart also is where his treasure lies. Even when mediocre police judges, or preachers of merely local fame, are valued at four or five times the price set on his own services, though it was not thus in Puritania of old, he will smile not too grimly at that also, and demand for the college library the books he can no longer set on his own shelves. His modest competence must be secure, his freedom of thought and speech, political action and social usefulness, unquestioned.

The trustees, once again, should be mainly men of liberal education as well as liberal ideas, because such men best understand, that the scholar's consecration, like that of the true priest, has nothing in common with the poverty of the lazy tramp or of the incompetent mechanic: that, if he is left unplaced in the race for millions, it is often solely because, like the elder Agassiz, he was "too busy" with more important matters "to make money."

The plane of living in those Puritanic villages was low and comparatively uniform for all. There was little to sate sensuous or aesthetic cravings. Though the imagination languished, the life of the spirit was perhaps all the stronger for those privations. Only a few of the elder scholars really were, like Whitney in philology or Peirce in mathemetics, men of international fame. But the love and honor lavished on "Pa" Tyler of Amherst, and hundreds like him, was more than earned by character, by devotion, by good works unceasing.

We in our day and generation crave little more. Among our students we cannot be truly efficient without that same meed of love and whole-hearted respect. If the parents disdain the works of the scholar, and proclaim that he lives by them be

cause he lacks the energy and capacity to share the larger income of tradesmen and promoters, it will not be easy to make the children think otherwise. In the long run a people must live or perish by its ideals. It cannot have a much better spiritual life, a much nobler posterity, than it deserves.

To the query raised in our title no direct answer has been given. Each great city community must make its own response: and indeed, ideals are necessarily set too high to be immediately and completely attained.

Certainly, the present conditions in America, and especially in the great cities, give ground at best for hope, not for full confidence. Material prosperity, physical energy, potential leisure for the higher life, we have in large measure already: but few indeed have learned the lesson of relative values. When the son of a millionaire banker, for instance, devotes his life to sympathetic study of the plastic arts, it is hardly even an example, but rather an isolated marvel. Far oftener does the master of newly-won wealth make the fatal mistake of the haughty nobles of imperial Rome, supposing that he can own the genius whose products he admires. Too often the corporation lawyer, the petted clergyman, even the family physician, is tempted to gild his chains with the price of his manly freedom. Certainly, as long as that rarest and most happily gifted among the sons of men, the great artist, the creator of beauty, is not yet hailed, when he appears, with reverent gratitude, but must too often choose between patronage and poverty,—so long, the mere scholar, who would but essay to reveal and interpret what he is powerless to create, may hardly dare repine if he too should fail of his birthright.

A college consists essential of faculty and students: of mature and youthful workers, all with equal eagerness seeking truth, for its own sake, in the deathless spirit of philosophy, but acquiring the chief profit in self-development amid helpful comradeship. Out of such colleges, and from the universities that supply in even larger measure the same atmosphere, the farsighted leaders of humanity will most frequently spring.

Such an institution can at least do something to remind the youth of the city that the problem of life is not finally solved by the accumulation of a million or even a billion of dollars. If a watch-word in a single sentence be desired, it might be Cicero's: "All studies that contribute to humane culture are united by a common bond," or Socrates's: "We account it the chief gain that we grow helpful one to another." Farther than either, perhaps, reëchoes the prophecy of Emerson's winged word: "To give all men access to the master-pieces of art and nature is the problem of civilization."

WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON

THE POETRY OF MR. LAURENCE BINYON

If Mr. Laurence Binyon were a painter he could not be more concerned with the color and form of things. His most distinctive poems are renderings of things seen-"London Visions" and Oriental pageants. The "London Visions" are renderings of the picturesqueness of London, some done with the artist's eyes wide open, others when he is in half-dream; the Oriental pageants have taken color and shape before him as he has read and brooded of the pomp and splendor of the life of old time in Magna Græca and Syria and Persia. A man living in London, even if he be a poet, cannot escape present-day problems and Mr. Binyon has determinately chosen to write often of London of to-day. A fourth of all his poems, a half of those of his maturity, are of London; but it is not London that fills his highest happiest dreams. These are of English seashore, of Montenegrin mountain, of Syrian deserts, of pageants in Antioch and Carmanian vales, of Arthurian romance.

From his first poems of "Primavera” in 1890 Mr. Binyon has been picturing landscape and ceremonials of splendid life, either for themselves or as symbols to interpret his own moods. Whatever else they contain the succeeding collections of his verse contain many descriptions. He has published seven volumes,' but they are very slim volumes, containing in all some 150 poems. These poems are written in many manners, though comtemplative lyrical and descriptive lyrical are his more usual modes. His narratives are generally told by a succession of pictures. When Mr. Binyon attempts the song-lyric, where description is less possible, he is uniformly less fortunate than in descriptive and contemplative verse. It is natural that a man of his temperament writing on the subjects he chooses should prefer the graver verse-forms, blank verse, the ode, and slowpaced rhymed pentameters. Writing of Mr. Robert Bridges' poetry, Mr. Binyon has expressed his admiration for "that structural beauty," that "wholeness of good tissue which is the pith

1 A new volume, "Penthesilea," appeared this spring, since the writing of this article.- ED.

of all enduring art." He would have art "proud, serene, and perfect." Mr. Binyon's own best poems are "proud" and "serene," "with structural beauty," but not, as he has written, built of pale words. It is strange, indeed, that Mr. Binyon, who owns in his essay on Keats how much he loves richness of color and harmony of form, and who reading his own verse must see its pageantry, can write

Pale are the words I built for my delight

To house in; pale as the chill mist that holds

An ardent morn. My fire to others' sight

But dimly burns through the frail speech it moulds;

I cast but shadows from my inward light.

This, when even the very shadows he writes of are purple, when his fire, though it burns dimly, burns dimly only because of the richness of the sacred glass through which we watch it glow; when there is no paleness in his poetry, no morning light, but the waning splendor of a spent sun in the afterglow. loves the time between sun-set and day's end!

How he

Come let us forth and wander the rich, the murmuring night!
The sky-blue dusk of summer trembles above the street.

And how the night itself!

Liquid gloom quivered with stars appearing endlessly. What splendor in the description of the dead city in the rockbound desert that Porphyrion fled, his vision peopling it with hosts "for mountain battle armed!" What amplitudes of space, of "boundless country darkening" in Porphyrion's outlook on the "great uplands dimly rolled" away to Antioch and the sea! Mr. Binyon, the son of a clergyman, has by birth-right an interest in "the storied sacred East," but it was of the landscapes of home that he first wrote, not then with many intimations of his later power. He was at Oxford in these days, but he writes strangely little of its old beauty, lover of all things beautiful that he is. Its "spires and towers" do loom up over the willows of "Cherwell Stream," but that is all of it we see. In "The Praise of Life" and "Porphyrion" the several poems picturing English countryside and seashore reveal his descriptive art at fuller power. There is the quiet joy of a day on the upper Thames