Imagens da página
PDF
ePub

its dream of white-cloaked volcanoes, Enoshima and Gotemba with their peerless Fujiyama, Nikko with its temples, Loch Lomond, Lake Tahoe, Windermere, Tintagel by the Cornish Sea, the Yellowstone and the Cañon of the Colorado, the Crater Lake of Oregon, Sorrento with its Vesuvius, Honolulu with its Pali, the Yosemite, Banff with its Selkirks, Prince Frederick's Sound with its green fjords, the Chamounix with its Mont Blanc, Bern with its Oberland, Zermatt with its Matterhorn, Simla with "the great silent wonder of the snows.'

"Even now as I write," says Whymper the master mountain climber, "they

rise before me an endless series of pictures magnificent in effect, in form and color. I see great peaks with clouded tops, seeming to mount upward for ever and ever. I hear the music of distant herds, the peasant's yodel and the solemn church bells. And after these have passed away, another train of thought succeeds, of those who have been brave and true, of kind hearts and bold deeds, of courtesies received from strangers' hands, trifles in themselves but expressive of that good-will which is the essence of charity."

That poetry was a means of grace was known to the first man who wrote a verse or who sang a ballad. It was dis

covered back in the darkness before men invented words or devised letters. The only poetry you will ever know is that you learned by heart when you were young. Happy is he who has learned much, and much of that which is good. Bad poetry is not poetry at all except to the man who makes it. For its creator, even the feeblest verse speaks something of inspiration and of aspiration. It is said that Frederick the Great went into battle with a vial of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verse in the other. Whatever we think of the one, we feel more kindly toward him for the other.

Charles Eliot Norton advises every

man to read a bit of poetry every day for spiritual refreshment. It would be well for each of us if we should follow this advice. It is not too late yet and if some few would heed his words and mine, these pages would not be written in vain.

I heard once of a man banished from New England to the Llano Estacado, the great summer-bitten plains of Texas. While riding alone among his cows over miles of yucca and sage he kept in touch with the world through the poetry he recited to himself. His favorite, I remember, was Whittier's "Randolph of Roanoke:"

"Here where with living ear and eye
He heard Potomac flowing,

And through his tall ancestral trees
Saw Autumn's sunset glowing;

"Too honest or too proud to feign
A love he never cherished,
Beyond Virginia's border line
His patriotism perished.

"But none beheld with clearer eye
The plague spot o'er her spreading,
Nor heard more sure the steps of doom
Along her future treading.”

This is good verse and it may well serve to relate the gray world of Northern Texas to the many-colored world in which men struggle and die for

« AnteriorContinuar »