THERE is a strain of primitive poetry running through the entire Irish race, a fleeting lyrical emotion which expresses itself in a flash, usually in connection with love of country and kindred across the sea. I had a touching illustration of it the other morning. The despot who reigns over our kitchen was gathering a mess of dandelions on the rear lawn. It was one of those blue and gold days which seem especially to belong New Eng-land. "It's in County Westmeath I 'd be this day," she said, looking up at me. "I'd go cool my hands in the grass on my ould mother's grave in the bit of churchyard foreninst the priest's house at Mullingar." I have seen poorer poetry than that in the magazines.
SPEAKING of the late Major Pond, the well-known director of a lecture bureau, an old client of his remarked: "He was a most capable manager, but it always made me a little sore to have him deduct twenty-five per cent. commis-sion." "Pond's Extract," murmured one of the gentlemen present.
EACH of our great towns has its "Little Italy,"
with shops where nothing is spoken but Italian and streets in which the alien pedestrian had better not linger after nightfall. The chief in-dustry of these exotic communities seems to be spaghetti and stilettos. What with our Little Italys and Chinatowns, and the like, an Ameri-can need not cross the ocean in order to visit foreign lands and enjoy the benefits of older civilizations.
POETS are made as well as born, the proverb notwithstanding. They are made possible by the general love of poetry and the consequent imperious demand for it. When this is non-existent, poets become mute, the atmosphere stifles them. There would have been no Shake-speare had there been no Elizabethan audience.
That was an age when, as Emerson finely puts it, Men became Poets, for the air was fame.
THE stolid gentleman in livery who has his car-riage-stand at the corner opposite my house is constantly touching on the extremes of human experience, with probably not the remotest per-ception of the fact. Now he takes a pair of lovers out for an airing, and now he drives the abscond-ing bank-teller to the railway-station. Except-ing as question of distance, the man has positively no choice between a theatre and a graveyard. I
met him this morning dashing up to the portals of Trinity Church with a bridal party, and this afternoon, as I was crossing Cambridge Bridge, I saw him creeping along next to the hearse, on his way to Mount Auburn. The wedding af-forded him no pleasure, and the funeral gave him no grief; yet he was a factor in both. It is his odd destiny to be wholly detached from the vital part of his own acts. If the carriage itself could speak! The autobiography of a public hack written without reservation would be dra-matic reading.
IN this blotted memorandum-book are a score or two of suggestions for essays, sketches, and poems, which I have not written, and never shall write. The instant I jot down an idea the desire to utilize it leaves me, and I turn away to do something unpremeditated. The shabby vol-ume has become a sort of Potter's Field where I
bury my literary intentions, good and bad, with-out any belief in their final resurrection.
A STAGE DIRECTION: exit time; enter Eternity--with a soliloquy.
