son

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as we lolled in the heat under our pine, as Henley sings in that tribute to his dead friend Steventhey drive the best of our dreams under,' they have looked and seen us,' but we are too blind to see them in their subtle and mysterious treatment of material things. But if we do see them at work, as some poets do, they bring back the the imperishable glories of forgotten

dreams."

"Oh, dreams are all right," murmured Jason from his crumpled form on the ground. "Yes, dreams are all right; only this confounded heat won't let the spirit cage them. Thought is like a wire door that their soft white breasts push open and away they fly to some cooler spot. I'll bet Cassandra is full of them, she looks so cool. How do you women manage it when the temperature is around a hundred?"

"Here, Jason,” I remonstrated, " we won't have that nonsense diverting this discussion about the Greeks."

"Well, let me know when you get to Aulis. I hope it will be in time to catch that favorable wind that is to take Agamemnon and his ships to Troy."

"Were they all dreams," I ignored Jason's levity, "which Euripides gave us in his drama? The invisible turning of Iphigenia into a deer at Aulis instead of making her Achilles' bride, to be sacrificed by the sword in the hands of her father in the hope of gaining from the gods a favorable wind to take his ships to Troy? And her mysterious reappearance at Tauris to perform

the sacrificial rites at the shrine of Artemis? Was all this a dream of wonder in the Greek dramatist? We regard these things as symbols, all these Greek myths. But were they not the dreams of a race intoxicated with beauty? Yes," I repeated, "intoxicated with beauty. And intoxicants we are becoming by the gifts of a few wise modern poets. Mr. Bynner, Mr. Hagedorn, and Mr. Ledoux have made us realize lately the need of these old dreams. But I was curious to note the profoundly modern note of faith with which Mr. Bynner ends his rendering of 'Iphigenia':

"The more in Thee we lose

Our lives, the more we find our life in Thee.

The poet himself italicized these lines, as if to emphasize the theology of St. Paul."

"Which St. Paul do you mean?" asked Jason. "There are two, you know. There is the St. Paul of the commentaries, and there is George Moore's St. Paul. In the opinion of the author of 'The Apostle,' and 'The Brook Kerith,' there was little difference between God and Zeus. He makes St. Paul crystallize the fancy of a pagan god into the reality of a Christian Deity."

"Your rambling about the superfine conceptions of George Moore is impertinent, to say the least," censured Cassandra.

"Oh, well, if a man can't be frivolous with a serious idea on a hot day, he ought to seek a cooler place than the present company of ladies,"

and Jason withdrew into the silence of his discomfiture.

"You certainly have none of the glory that was Greece in your behavior," I charged Jason. "I half believe that you agree with some modern poets that there is no glory left in the memory of Greece. Tinsel, remote, and shop-worn are all those gods and heroes that men once believed in. Thus to make poetry out of their fabled doings, and to give them character in story and drama, is all wrong, because they have no relation to the common people of to-day."

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"The glory that was Greece is in my very blood," mocked Jason. "It is so very warm and fervent at this moment."

"Mocker!" cried Cassandra.

"All the figures of that world of legendary Greece, so real to the religious fervor of the Greeks, the modern world has inherited as the symbols of human destiny and experience; and their significance, after thousands of years, has not lost force nor meaning," I went on. "Pagan ideals, as Mr. Lowes Dickinson has shown us, and which those symbols clothe, are the ideals which in our spiritual nature we strive most to realize. If we could combine the ideals of paganism

grace, beauty and sanity—with the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity, we would have a perfect humanity. We can scarcely reach that perfection towards which we aspire without the wedding of these high qualities of paganism and Christianity. The modernist who neglects to ap

preciate this fact looks at life with atrophied faculties. And this is true of many of your bards of democracy. Life is keenest, brightest, full of the virtues which affect our unceasing efforts to evoke the dominant passions of joy and beauty when rooted in Greek thought and feeling. Yet a certain critical attitude to-day can see no force of life in pagan subjects, because there is no vital ugliness such as modern civilization presents through social diseases and industrial tyranny. The queer conceptions which advocate that life can only be discerned and experienced in such conditions as sadden our relation to the world, and our fellowmen, and which repudiate any attempt to heal our spirits by holding up the mirror of imagination to that old world of beauty, are erroneous."

"But now and then, here in America, a poet speaks out for the old beauty," claimed Psyche.

"Yea; and the most thoroughly imbued with the classic mood, among the younger American poets, is Louis V. Ledoux," I replied. "In him rings a genuine passion. No false simulation; no mere reflection of a glamor that is remote by association, nor the thin echo of other imaginative voices, has any part in him. Take the speech of Persephone, in the fourth act of his new lyrical drama The Story of Eleusis,' and note the real vision that animates his art:

old

"I knew not that the world was very
And sad beneath the burden of its years,

But here among the souls of men outworn
Are folk of long ago; forgotten kings

Of cities buried by the sand or sea

In unremembered ages; shepherd boys

Who learned their piping ere the birth of Pan;
Slim maidens sweet to love; and children lost
White petals fallen in a field of death
Where winter turning stood against the spring.
Yea, few there are who walk the flowering earth,
But here among its fields of asphodel

This windless underworld of dusk and dream
Has more than all the fields of earth could hold,
And all the vastness of the circling sea.

"Besides the beauty of the verse, stately and rich in its calm melodic simplicity, there is envisaged a feeling for the deeper message of life.”

"I was impressed with a notice I saw of this drama, by Nathan Haskell Dole," said Psyche, "and I clipped it to paste in my copy of the book. Let me read what it says, because it proves your claim that a contemporary poet can deal with a Greek theme, and yet express the vital problems of life." And turning to the back of her book she read: "Mr. Ledoux has not been able to escape his modern education. . . Her grief-Demeter's is merely the personification of human grief and the death and resurrection of Persephone, like the death and resurrection of the Christ, yearly enacted in almost all modern churches, commemorates the annual death of Autumn and the annual rebirth of Spring. We feel its sadness and we likewise feel