One of these Echoes is a poet's reply to a little boy's question on his Christmas lesson about the Wise Men from the East: "Why were they three, instead of five or seven?" One is on the words, "He leadeth me beside the still waters; he restoreth my soul." It is difficult to choose among these forty poems, and tastes would differ; the one which most holds us is entitled "Mirage.” Its five pages are too long to quote and its story is not easy to condense, but its argument is just and true and glorious. The great truth in solution in its hundred and seventy lines is that man is the culmination of all earthly grandeurs, the consummation and crowned king of the world, Nature's supreme and only use being to act as a setting for man's significance and to serve his needs. That is the meaning of Bliss Carman's saying that Beauty is "the superb eternal noun which takes no verb but love." A painter spends an enchanted summer at little Siasconset on the seaward side of the Island of Nantucket. At the season's end there stands upon his easel the most significant of all the summer's work. One day he had strolled along the beach to "Tom Nevers Head, the lone last land that fronts the ocean, lone and grand as when the Lord first bade it be for a surprise and mystery." There, all alone in the vast solitude of sea and shore and moor, the conviction came to him of the worthlessness of the earth by its mere self. He saw and felt that beauty and grandeur are nothing

without soul, and that it is the presence and the power of man the godlike that alone give meaning and use and reason to the world of nature; that earth's intention and raison d'être is to be the arena and the setting for the human soul, with its aspirations and struggles, its joys and sorrows its loves and prayers and victories, its toils and triumphs, its exultations and its tears. Then he gave himself to putting this sublime conviction on canvas. He painted first as powerfully as he could a picture of the sea and shore and sky, far outspread and high uplifted with all their majesty, beauty, and splendor of color, and then he painted into the middle of his picture “a vivid questing human face, up-gazing against the blue with eyes that heaven itself shone through, the lips half-parted as in prayer, scanning the heavens as if asking grace and confident of kindness from above; a face as tender as a happy girl's, where meet repose and ardor, strong and sweet; looking as Virgin Mary might have looked into the annunciation angel's eyes with faith and fearlessness and innocence." The artist made all the glory and wonder of the universe bend and lean about that human head. And when he had finished the picture, a sermon on canvas, into which he had put his meaning with all his might and skill, he stands before it and proclaims its significance thus:

"In other years when men shall say,

'What was the painter's meaning, pray?

Why all this vast of sea and space,
Just to enframe a woman's face?'
Here is the pertinent reply,

'What better use for earth and sky?"

To us this is the noblest of all the poems in these Echoes from Vagabondia. In these Echoes we hear Bliss Carman owning his subjection to the seductive spell of elemental things breathing on him through the nature-sounds he hears:

"My forest cabin half-way up the glen
Is solitary save for one wise thrush,
The sound of falling waters and the wind
Mysteriously conversing with the leaves."

Our poet sitting at night by that seat and shrine and reservoir of primal elements, the hearthstone, sings his closing verse:

"The stormy midnight whispers,
As I muse before the fire
On the ashes of ambition

And the embers of desire,

'Life has no other logic

And time no other creed

Than: "I for joy will follow

Where thou for love dost lead."'"

A soul might say that to its divine Saviour and

Lord.

BEATING THE DRUM OF ETERNITY.

JAMES HUNEKER, brilliant literary critic, wrote of Eternity and the Town-Pump, the vast encompassing the minute, the trivial overarched by the tremendous, the commonplace embosomed in the sublime. In 1912 three men of mark in the intellectual world came across the Atlantic to speak to American audiences: Rudolf Eucken, of Germany; Henri Bergson, of France; Alfred Noyes, of England; men of eminence and fame in philosophy and literature, as well known probably to the reading public in this country as in Europe; masters of thought and speech who, in Andrew Carnegie's phrase, "carry in their hearts and brains the magic contained in words and can apply it to their fellow men"-men not of the sort that "darken counsel by words without knowledge," nor like the congressman of whom Speaker Reed said, "That man never speaks without subtracting something from the sum-total of human knowledge; we know less when he ends than we did when he began."

The significance which Eucken, Bergson, and Noyes possess in common is that they are messengers of the spirit and exponents of the spiritual life, whose utterances are equivalent to beating the drum of eternity amid our absorbing secularities, and in the midst of an irreverent,

gainsaying, and profane generation calling on the Zeitgeist to lead in prayer. We may help ourselves to prize them and value their visit by reflecting how different and how disturbing would have been the effect if Europe had sent us three of its arch-unbelievers and scoffers, haters of religion and despisers of Christianity, to mock and flout the things of the spirit, to preach among us materialism's infinitely harmful no-gospel of dirt and despair; or had sent three of its reckless iconoclasts and rabid revolutionists to pour upon our American populace their violent, vicious, and virulent vocabularies, assailing the foundations of religion and morals, defying authority and government, and so menacing all order and security, political, social, and religious. Of these three ambassadors and advocates of the spirit, Eucken, Bergson, and Noyes, the young poet appears quite worthy to stand with the two famous philosophers; being not without a clear, coherent, and creditable philosophy of his own akin to theirs, and seeming quite as well equipped for his sphere and service as they for theirs.

That Alfred Noyes is not without significance, noteworthy and exceptional, has been certified in the estimate put upon his work by such judges as Kipling, Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, Theodore Watts-Dunton, and others similar, who, we are told, have rated him the most considerable English poet since Tennyson.