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 wingéd 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

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 ti. 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

in "The First Day of Summer;" the subject and sentiment of "The Oak" recall experiences and thoughts of happy rambles in the New Forest; "May Evening" is described as it is in every English farming county. Each of these poems is in its way beautiful, but not one of them smacks of the soil, has the home-thrust of observation that brings back to keen senses the very tang of wood and tillage. Mr. Binyon, whatever his upbringing, is in his poetry no more than a city man. Although there is little detail, country-side and seashore are present to these descriptive poems in form and color, but taste and smell and sound are seldom used to bring very out-of-doors before us. A flower to Mr. Binyon is apt to be a thing of beauty, or a symbol of beauty, and nothing more; not, too, a primrose or a foxglove whose mention would make the definite appeal of a thing known and loved. So seldom does he name a bird that it is a real surprise to find that he does know a thrush and can speak definitely of his "dewy notes." I state his neglect of the little things of Nature not as a defect, but as a limitation. It is not the way of his masters Tennyson and Wordsworth, but of his more remote master Milton, who wrote before Englishmen were wholly awake to the beauty of England, and of his chiefest master Keats, like Milton a cockney and like him a man who lived too little out-of-doors.

There is one poem, however, in which Mr. Binyon makes a selection of symbols that brings the scenes he paints before you in their utmost beauty and significance. If each of the three scenes were a painting you would fall to discussing whether the "atmosphere" of the first or last were more wonderful. "The Drift-Wood Gatherers" seems to me Mr. Binyon's perfect poem. It is not the highest poetry he essays here-sketches of an old peasant couple at their little tasks by the Atlantic. He first presents the old man and woman gathering driftwood "along the deep shelve of the abandoned shore;" then on "their homeward path, bordered with heath and pine," then at their humble meal of autumn fare while "the low lamp kindles their old cheeks." This cottage life by the shore is of the life that Crabbe knew, but what different scenes he chose to select from it; how despairing his, how heartening this of Mr. Binyon's!

"The Driftwood Gatherers" is a poem to be put beside Mr. A. C. Benson's "Shepherd;" both are bits from the heart of English peasant life, now so fast disappearing. It illustrates how happy Mr. Binyon may be in his dicton. Driftwood, the word itself, and that of which it is the symbol, has every association of romance, but the picture is drawn almost realistically. How well the homely words are chosen! The reader's heart cannot but warm with sympathy as he reads of "heath and pine," of the "happy fire" leaping on the "swept stones," of the old songs the woman sings, of the man's feigned chiding. There is an element of narrative in "The Driftwood Gatherers" as in so many of Mr. Binyon's more successful verses, but the story of an afternoon and evening in the life of an old couple is told by a succession of pictures. It is just such a poem as a painter might illustrate without distortion.

It would seem from the record in Mr. Binyon's verse that he has had deeply happy outings in Flanders, in Portugal, in Montenegro and in Italy, as well as in his own England. Montenegro, of foreign lands, lifts his heart highest, since there he finds three of the things he loves most-pines and mountains and free men.

Mr. Binyon has written of many sides of London life, of many kinds of London scenes, generally as they are summed up in a characteristic picture. Now it is a great dray rolling down the street, its giant driver guiding it triumphantly; now it is Duse as Magda; now the great golden dome of St. Paul's looming above the smoke-wrapped city; now Salvation Army singers, in whose enthusiasm the poet sees the reincarnation of the delirious spirit that fired the Dionysia's "mad, leafly revels at the Wine-God's will;" now a quiet sunset on "full-flooding Thames.” Various lights illumine these city scenes Mr. Binyon chooses, but while dawnlight and full-noon and sunset color some, London at night inspires so many that I have come to think the characteristic lights of the poems are the flickering gas of street lamps.

Miles out of London in the fragrant country fields he looks down on London's "endless fiery maze," where "night comes to few unanxious happy eyes." As he writes in this early poem