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library, where she waited for her first lesson, I brought all my favorites-challenged by her scorn of the moderns; critics, poets, collections. Under a flood of lyrics-Edna Millay, Hodgson, and Housman, chiefly-my bright-faced pupil ceased to mourn and rage against modern dullness and stupidity. The "Prayer to Persephone" was beautiful; yes, it was; but why did Miss Millay spoil all the tenderness by the ending:

"My dear, my dear,

It is not so dreadful here."

As if that were the way to talk to an erring child!

drunken, just as it says it is. I think it is perfectly terrible. Motherhood is sacred, and if you don't feel sacred about it, I don't think you should write about it."

So we gave up motherhood for a theme. Nature was, after all, safest. And sure enough, in a few weeks came an exquisite little poem about snow in the woods, an unliterary poem, imitating no one.

Then, suddenly, we struck another difficulty, and Nature was to blame, this time. The beautiful skunk-cabbage wanted to get into a poem. I had never seen skunk-cabbage and insisted that it couldn't get in.

"Skunk-cabbage is sacred to anAnd how shocking to say, if you other association," I insisted. really meant it:

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"Why, you've just read me a poem where Rupert Brooke put blankets and hot water into a serious

poem, and made it exciting and beautiful. His teacher probably told him that there were all kinds of reasons why they couldn't be used in anything but doggerel."

She wrote the poem in spite of me, and I stuck to my opinion, verbally. The poem wasn't bad; I began rather to like the use of the homely word. We were each slowly being convinced by the other's point of view.

"I woke up last night saying one of Millay's poems. How wonderful it seemed in the dark! Do you think it will live forever?"

We met not long ago and recounted the arguments of the lessons, three years before. There is

It was Eunice Tietjens's Bac- another child in the family. Spinchante to Her Babe.

"That is just what I think is so awful about modern poetry. It has no reverence at all. The poem is

ach lunches are continuous. But there have been two books of poetry as well.

"Do you remember how we fought

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Is this teaching, merely? I have told you of the intoxication, not the teaching. There is a craft to be learned, but of that I cannot talk except in the concrete, when faced by the problem of an actual poem.

As for theory, to begin with, there is the first proposition that any one who wants badly enough to write, can. An active electron creates the longing-it wants out and needs proper treatment from its poet. A young poet is afraid and humble. He must be taught to have arrogance and to be brave. When he first begins to write, and when he is listening to the many half-formed lines inside himself, he selects what sounds most like literature and rejects all that sounds unfamiliar and bold.

Of course the hackneyed and the banal, the cliché and the orotund, seem fine to him. How did he manage to sound so much like a real poet, he asks himself in delight. Marvelous! If an original line has slipped out of him, under the rope of the censor, he looks at it a moment and crosses it out for its unchastened sound. Soon he has fourteen linesor longer. Shelley, Keats, Byron, Browning, Milton, Tennyson, Swinburne, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Service, Whittier, and O. O. Nobody, all blended into one neutral boardone neutral boarding-house dainty. The consummate

stupidity of the traveling generations! And it looks like a blaze of light to him; and he falls down and worships. It is his, and inspired.

The teacher's task is a ferocious. one. This is false; this is falser. Here, and here only, is something alive. There is your poem. Take that and let it lead you off into the wilderness and never come back.

But besides being a sort of surgeon, the teacher has to be a poet too, and show the young poet his own poem as it exists ideally. That is why teaching is so hard. For the teacher must conceive and see fulfilled, in a dim way, what the poet himself cannot yet see the unwritten poem, lying under the scrapheap.

When the words come out too pat, and have a fatal smoothness, I scratch all the fine finish by giving him a series of experiments.

"Write me a poem that will make me feel cold. I'll venture you can't."

The next week, very likely, will come a grinding square piece of typewriting, adjectivally cold, nothing else. He hadn't got the point.

"I want a poem that is cold, not one that says it is. I want verse that acts cold."

Of course that is a difficult demand.

After the pupil knows that I want him to try to convey sensations by the rhythm, or by the connotations, or by the structure of his verse, he looks at me with a wild glint in his eye when I criticize:

"This line is very bad. It falls to pieces."

"But," he says triumphantly, "I'm trying to make you feel motion. And this line moves."

"Walking is falling down and getting up again, but it isn't staying down."

And at this point, if the young poet takes you too literally, you give

up.

He will love metaphysical language. It will be less and less necessary to tell him anything except in symbol form.

In a short while he will insist on writing sonnets.

When I look over all the little poetry magazines and see the sonnets therein, they seem like the eggs the farmer threw out of the window"Pretty good eggs." Pretty good sonnets are equally useless. I would walk a mile to avoid a pretty good

sonnet.

But still the young poet will want to try his hand. When Leonard Bacon was sternly instructing me in the prosody of Mr. Saintsbury, and guiding me by the pure star of the Miltonic grandeur at the University of California, I wrote an assignment of some one hundred sonnets for him, of which number he considered three passable-nay, rather fine. Stern as he was, I think the three, even, were abominable. Nevertheless one hundred sonnets mean one hundred pitched bat

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Most poets write sonnets as if they were swimming from side to side of a large swimming-pool. In the middle of each line they begin to churn to reach the other side; they do so with a great gasp-reach out a stiff arm and touch the edge (this is the rime at the end of the line)—and push off hard to zigzag over to the next stop. And with a great flat rime they end, climb out of the water, and demonstrate that they are land animals by an air of "Thank goodness, that's over!"

Still, I am not sorry that the land is dotted with sonneteers—if I don't have to read their works. And in time, your pupil will say: "I am tired of sonnets. It's like a disease. I begin to see everything in terms of that miserable sterile form."

He is fast working beyond you. You say oftener and oftener, to his questions, "I don't know."

THE RISE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Lifting the Burdens from the Shoulders of All Men

WILLIAM E. DODD

YHEN Andrew Jackson, the Mary Todd, cheery little aristocrat

Whappy warrior, trim, correct,

both feet out of the grave, well dressed and well mounted, bade farewell to Washington that memorable March day, 1837, the next great president of the United States was in the making, far off on the prairies of Illinois: Abraham, son of poor Nancy Hanks and trifling Thomas Lincoln who had hired the boy to hard-fisted farmers on Pigeon Creek, Indiana, for twenty-five cents a day and put the proceeds into his own dirty pockets; Abraham Lincoln, six feet four, awkward, loose-jointed, and uneasy, used to the ills of a life that promised little but ill; meditative, restless, now and then called "the mad Lincoln," a young lawyer, twenty-eight years old, a member of the legislature of Illinois, and engaged, with his hustling calculating little friend, Stephen A. Douglas, twenty-four years old, in a piece of the most foolish legislation that was ever enacted. An interesting couple: the elongated Lincoln paying ardent court to one woman and trying to escape the tender suggestions of another, sitting now and then on the conventional sofa in the "elegant home" of ex-Governor Edwards, his legs too long, his feet too big, with the comfortable, rotund, aspiring

from Kentucky, beside him. On the other end of the sofa sat the same buoyant friend, Douglas, absurdly short, delicate of frame, with small fashionable feet and beautiful tender hands, a huge head crowned with a shock of raven hair at the top of him

Douglas in deadly earnest. The dénouement was amusing. Douglas, with all his cleverness, was rejected of the lady, and Lincoln was accepted, accepted before he offered. Would the path of so crude a figure lead to the place where Andrew Jackson had fought so desperately, the place Henry Clay three times failed to reach?

Few prophets would have ventured: yes. But strange are the maneuvers of History, whether they tended to weave the web of Abraham Lincoln's life or whether they so enmeshed the men and forces of the expanding national life that the field-hand of Pigeon Creek should be called to sit in judgment upon all the works of the mighty South, its vast plantations, its millions of black slaves, and decree the fates of Jefferson Davis, the most powerful of senators, and Robert E. Lee, most princely of Americans. It was indeed a marvelous fate that was beckoning; and strange were the move

ments and maneuvers of the men that hastened it.

The great, jubilant, frontier and mountaineer party of Andrew Jackson turned under the leadership of the suave Martin Van Buren into the calm walks of safety and was overwhelmed by the matchless and unscrupulous Whigs in 1840. Coming again to power in 1844, the party of Jackson became the party of reaction, of slavery unchangeable, decreed of fate and God alike. And, when the fierce political war of 1850 was past, both parties declared slavery a fixed and everlasting thing -smug national content in the face of wrongs and ills that denied and betrayed all the ideals of the Revolutionary fathers. In these changeful times Stephen A. Douglas entered the national life as a representative in Congress, attracted the attention of the country, became a senator from Illinois, and in 1852 was a contender for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party, what we would call a progressive in the party of conservative reaction. A little later the homely form of Lincoln appeared in Washington, the irrepressible, if charming, Mary Todd at his side. He too was a representative, a member of the dying Whig party, what we would call a progressive seeking a place in the other great party of conservative reaction. But Lincoln righteously opposed in 1847 an unrighteous war waged upon a weak neighbor, lost his hold, and retired to the dreary life of smudgy Springfield, grabbing in vain at a Washington clerkship as he and the disconsolate Mary made their way back home.

The law, the dingy little office, and

the irrepressible William H. Herndon, abolitionist, for a partner; cases in court, cheap tricks with juries, long rides from court-house to court-house, and an occasional visit to the hustling, filthy, stinking Chicago: these were to be the routine and the events of Lincoln's outward life, while a snug modest home, increasing children, and a busy, fussy little housewife offered what compensating domestic joys there were. In the midst of these unalluring humdrum performances, Douglas, now the "great senator from Illinois," recently bereaved of his beautiful and adorable wife, Martha Martin of North Carolina, who had borne him three sons, left him the master of a plantation in Mississippi and a hundred slaves, the ambitious, the dexterous, contriving Little Giant, the very picture of prosperity, the hope of a hundred politicians, the Henry Clay of the decade that preceded the deluge, offered in the Senate a bill which opened the door again to Lincoln. It was the bill, often discussed and as often misapprehended, that proposed to set up two new Territories, Kansas and Nebraska, build a railway from Chicago to the Pacific, and erect half a dozen new States west of the Missouri-make of the Northwest the dominant section of the Union and perchance enable its author to sit in the seat of Washington. In order to bring all these things to pass, Douglas found it necessary to agree to many concessions: public lands for the building of little railroads in the Northwestern States, feeders of new cities; and finally the admission into the vast new region of the precious slaves and their eager masters.

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