reason and experiment, and establish a socialistic, rapt communion between each man and all his fellow-men. It is true that poetry has been relieved of its shrinking, subjective, æsthetic character, and is no longer of mere back-water beauty. And it is Masefield himself who has done much to render English poetic language bold and modern and free from false dignity or languorous ease. So far Mr. Brooke's idea has been borne out.

But Mr. Brooke was pleading for none of the "red meat," none of the "rolling in the mud," none of the unbalanced frenzy that Mr. Masefield in his notorious long narrative poems has seemed to deem essential to this social conception. He did not propose that the public should hail with awe such a declaration of poetic duty as this:

Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;

Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!

Theirs be the music, the color, the glory, the gold;

Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould.

Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. Amen.

Or such a defence of sottishness as this:

I heard a drunken fiddler, in Billy Lee's saloon,
I brooked an empty belly with thinking of the tune:
I swung the doors disgusted as drunkards rose to dance,
And now I know the music was life and life's romance.

Or such a low-browed pugilist reminiscence as this:
Time! There was Bill as grim as death,
He rushed, I clinched, to get more breath,
And breath I got, though Billy bats
Some stinging short-arms in my slats.
And when we broke, as I foresaw,
He swung his right in for the jaw.
I stopped it on my shoulder bone,
And at the shock I heard Bill groan
A little groan or moan or grunt
As though I'd hit his wind a bunt.

We cannot follow the poet here, where the calmness and the balance of a great philosophy are wanting. Masefield has spoken too often of "red blood," has appealed too often to the primitive, has cautioned us too often not to forget that we are animals. If this were all that he had done, it would be a simple matter to class him with the decadents. But this is not his representative work. He has done better.

Mr. Masefield is important, probably the most important of living English poets, because of the new beauty that he feels. Throughout the nineteenth century, beauty in poetry meant something overrefined, something seeking retreat, something too finely tinted for the strong sunlight, something held at arm's length upon an appropriate background. Masefield's beauty is of a different order. It leaps up at him and envelops him; it bears down on him and intoxicates him; it is ever present and tangible. It is an exultation he is never without feeling. True, it has little of the spiritual in it, is oftenest physical; in his description he reports rather than interprets. But he is the prophet and not the Jehovah of

this beauty.

The beauty of the sea holds most for our poet. The waves, ships at anchor and ships full-sailed, sailors rude and sailors tender, every sentiment known upon the waters - all these he worships unreservedly. "The ships," he says, "made me." In one of his prose tales he reveals this fascination in a peculiarly penetrating fashion.

"The ship was like a thing carved out of pearl. The sailors, as they lay sleeping in the shadows, were like august things of bronze. And the skies seemed so near me, I felt as though we were sailing under a roof of dim branches that bore the moon and the stars like shining fruits. Gradually, however, the peace in my heart gave way to an eating melancholy, and I felt a sadness, such as has come to me but twice in my life. With the sadness there came a horror of the water and the skies, till my presence in that ship, under the ghastly corpse-light of the moon, among that sea, was a terror to me past power of words to tell. I went to the ship's rail, and shut my eyes for a moment, and then opened them to look down at the water rushing past. I had shut my eyes upon the sea, but when I opened them I looked upon the forms of the sea spirits. The water was indeed there, hurrying aft as the ship cut through; but in the bright foam far about the ship I saw multitudes of beautiful, inviting faces that had an eagerness and a swiftness in them unlike the speed or

the intensity of human beings. I remember that I had never seen anything of such passionate beauty as those faces, and as I looked at them my melancholy fell away like a rag.”

Running water sounds always musically in his ears:

Spanish waters, Spanish waters, you are ringing in my ears,
Like a slow sweet piece of music from the gray forgotten years;
Telling tales, and beating tunes, and bringing weary thoughts to me
Of the sandy beach at Muertos, where I would that I could be.

There is the beauty of leaping vigor, of restless enthusiasm, in his best and most characteristic lines. They run on swiftly and nimbly, carrying us on by the mere force of their spirit. The man himself loves motion and abandonment :

It is good to be out on the road, and going one knows not where, Going through meadow and village, one knows not whither nor why;

Through the gray light drift of the dust, in the keen cool rush of the

air,

Under the flying white clouds, and the broad blue lift of the sky;

And to halt at the chattering brook, in the tall green fern at the brink

Where the harebell grows, and the gorse, and the fox-gloves purple and white;

Where the shy-eyed delicate deer troop down to the pools to drink, When the stars are mellow and large at the coming on of the night.

O! to feel the warmth of the rain, and the homely smell of the earth,
Is a tune for the blood to jig to, a joy past power of words;
And the blessed green comely meadows seem all aripple with mirth
At the lilt of the shifting feet, and the dear wild cry of the birds.

He slashes his way through such a passage as that matchless description of the rounding of Cape Horn in "Dauber," delighting in the rush of the seas, dipping his head in the stormy beauty of it all. His best work has been done in that description; especially in the following stanza :

All through the windless night the clipper rolled
In a great swell with oily gradual heaves
Which rolled her down until her time-bells tolled
Clang, and the weltering water moaned like beeves.
The thundering rattle of slatting shook the sheaves,
Startles of water made the swing ports gush,

The sea was moaning and sighing and saying "Hush!"

This could well be a touchstone of poetry along with the King's soliloquy in Henry IV, part II.

Masefield knows no restraint; holds no power in reserve; writes always at white heat. For this reason for his haste and his diffuseness -- he cannot for the present be called better than a minor poet. Only when his art is less headlong; only when that high strung, luxuriant sympathy for common humanity is less maudlin and more universal in the appeal of its philosophy; only then will Masefield be more than a passing flame.

MR. ROOSEVELT IN PALESTINE

WHEN Mr. Roosevelt popularized the phrase, "the psychological moment," it became at once evident that he, above all others, realized the apt significance of the expression. Mr. Roosevelt's psychological moments have been many. He seems to appear or disappear, invent, discover, create, at times and places, in manner and degree, anything he wishes which will cause him to occupy a prominent place on the public horizon. Life has never been for him a humdrum existence. He makes it spicy, attractive, of tremendous interest and importance both to himself and to those that watch him.

Out in Palestine natives still remember him as an unusual specimen of boyhood. He was too frail to accompany his father and mother through the country by carriage. He was not too frail, however, as soon as their respective backs were turned upon his safe, sheltered, and refined housing with a professor's family in Beirût to appropriate the native cook's red goatskin slippers and an obstinate little donkey and ride madly from morning until night over the sands of the long stretch of beach. He conquered the donkey and proved his ability to ride in Palestine. He managed to interest himself in everything he saw and left the mark of his personality on teaparty and street fight alike. There are those who still remember his stopping things just that he might see how to start them up again.

The potter at his wheel, the spinner at the loom, the weaver of the carpet, the teller of the tale in the coffee-house none escaped. Only after the jar was shaped, the bit of silk woven, the pattern in the carpet made clear, and the Arab story that had interested him because of the laugh it had created had been translated, was he content.

This filling of his life with specific knowledge of things as they are has helped him to a clearer interpretation of possibilities, to attach significance to trivial details, to see everything and every act with an appraising eye. His following a trail to find at the end an undiscovered river is only another example of his boyhood's ambition to know the why of everything, that he might taste the joy of the conqueror and that the world might taste it with him.

OUR MILITARY UNPREPAREDNESS

IF the Mexican situation has done nothing more, it has, at least, shown our military weakness and opened our eyes to the necessity of increasing our military forces. There is little probability that this Mexican fracas will develop into a great war, but nevertheless military commanders are in a quandary as to what they would do if war should be declared.

They have under their command only 18,000 trained United States army men. As at least 250,000 volunteers would be needed in any struggle large enough to be called a war, we can to some extent realize the great problem of drilling these men in the simple military movements in a short space of time. Undrilled men are almost worthless in a battle field. In substance, we do not have a sufficient standing army to defend ourselves or uphold the dignity and honor of the United States. Increasing the state militia or National Guards would alleviate conditions.

As long as there are separate nations, so long will there be need of force, need of armies to enforce peace. David Starr Jordan, in advocating disarmament, has made the assumption that the spirit of struggle and warfare has disappeared in this twentieth century. Although tempered by the study of the humanistic and sociological sides of life, this spirit of war is yet burning in the breasts of men to-day. Therefore, to reiterate, it is our duty as one of the foremost nations of the world to represent a bulwark of military strength to enforce peace, especially on this side of the Atlantic.