tion of himself, and showed signs of humility that were rarely if ever visible.

Hinton meantime was taking soundings, and sometimes his plummet stopped where it started, and sometimes it dropped to an unexpected depth.

"Well," he said at last, rising, “We must go to bed. You'll go on climbing a ladder in the air, and I'll go on burrowing like a mole in the ground, and what is the good of it all? What chance have either of us for coming out anywhere? You can fool yourself; I can't; that's the difference."

Mr. Opp's unusual mental exertions had apparently affected his entire body; his legs were tightly wrapped about each other, his arms were locked, and his features were drawn into an amazing pucker of protest.

"That ain't it," he said emphatically, struggling valiantly to express his conviction, "this here life business ain't run on any such small scale as that. According to my notion or understanding it's-well-what you might call, in military figures, a fight." He paused a moment, and tied himself if possible into even a tighter knot; then he proceeded slowly and groping his way, "Of course there's some that just remains around in camp, afraid to fight and afraid to desert, just sort of indulging in conversation, you might say, about the rest of the army. Then there is the cowards and deserters. But a decent sort of a individual, or rather soldier, carries his orders around with him, and the chief and principal thing he's got to do is to follow them. What the fight is concerning, or in what manner the General is a-aiming to bring it all correct in the end, ain't, according to my conclusion, a particle of our business!"

Having arrived at this point of the discussion in a somewhat heated and indignant state, Mr. Opp suddenly remembered his duties as host. With a lordly wave of the hand. he dismissed the subject and conducted Hinton in state to his bed chamber, where he insisted upon lighting the fire and arranging the bed.

Hinton sat for a long time before undressing, listening to the wind in the chimney, to the scrape, scrape of the cedar on the roof, and to the yet more dismal sounds that were echoing in his heart. Everything about the old house spoke

of degeneration, decay, yet in the midst of it lived a man who asked no odds of life, who took what came, and who lived with a zest, an abandon, a courage that were baffling. Self-deception, egotism, cheap optimism, could they bring a man to this state of mind? Hinton wondered bitterly what Opp would do in his position, suppose his sight was threatened, how far would his foolish self-delusion serve him then?

But he could not imagine Mr. Opp-lame, halt, or blind -giving up the fight. There was that in the man, egotism, courage, whatever it was, that would never recognize defeat, that quality that wins, out of a life of losing, the final victory. Before he retired, Hinton found there was no drinking water in his room, and, remembering a pitcher full in the dining room, he took the candle and softly opened his door. The sudden cold draught from the hall made the candle flare, but as it steadied, Hinton saw that an old cot had been placed across the door opposite his, as if on guard, and that beside it, in his night clothes, a shivering figure knelt, with his head. clasped in his hands. It was Mr. Opp saying his prayers.

CALE YOUNG RICE

[1872- ]

CAL

MARGARET STEELE ANDERSON

ALE YOUNG RICE, poetic dramatist and lyric poet, was born 'in Dixon, Webster County, Kentucky, December 7, 1872. While he was still in early childhood his family removed to Evansville, where he grew up and prepared for college. He went first to Cumberland University and afterward to Harvard, where he took the degrees of A.B. and A.M. In 1890 his family removed to Louisville, he joining it later, after filling, for a year, the chair of English literature at Cumberland. On December 18, 1902, he was married to Alice Caldwell Hegan, whose first work was then making its way in the field of the short novel. Since that time, though varied by much travel and other pleasures, the life of the two has been a life of literary work, Mr. Rice giving most of his time to poetic drama, which he finds his particular element. While distinctly a poet and devoting his life to his work, he is interested in affairs political and social; he is a man who has thought much of the great problems of religion and of morals; he is equally the student of the outdoor world and of psychical forces; and his sympathies, naturally acute, have been broadened by the sight of a varied life. Mr. Rice, being still a young man, has, humanly speaking, a long life of work in front of him. Up to this time he has written four dramas, one of which, "A Night in Avignon," has been successfully played by Donald Robertson, whose ventures in producing the literary drama are already known to the public. "Yolanda of Cyprus," another play, will be staged by Mr. Robertson in 1909; and meanwhile a new volume of lyrics, 'Nirvana Days,' will be published by the McClure Company.

Mr. Rice's lyrical work may be divided, perhaps, into four groups: poems of nature, poems of philosophy and meditation, poems of love, and many brief, dramatic narratives. Of his lyrics, which deal with nature, it may be said that their distinguishing quality is a faithfulness to both material and spiritual truth. It is not merely the colors of autumn that delight the poet; it is also her melancholy and the longing she evokes for something after death. It is not merely the ripeness of July that he loves, but the silence and solitude of her deep forests where the stillness suggests eternities. It is not only the outward beauty and majesty of the sea that compels him, but

the sea as "a surging shape of life's unfathomed morn," the "incarnate motion of all mystery." The deep reveling in tangible beauty -which is natural and joyous-is the lesser part of this poetry; and here, too, the revel is ethereal, symbolized, not so much by the nymph in the brake, as by the delicate day-moon.

In his poetry of philosophy and meditation there is a constant sense of the highest, the noblest. This is most fully expressed in two poems, "The Young to the Old" and "Invocation," the first of which is a plea for human dream and endeavor; in the second we find the aspiring spirit which marks so much of his poetry.

Of the dramatic lyrics, the finest, perhaps, are "Jael," "Adelil," "Mary at Nazareth," "A Japanese Mother," "Wormwood" and "On the Moor," all of which have the true romantic character, a mingling of simplicity and mystery. The conception of Jael is unusual, the woman being portrayed as at once triumphant and terrified.

As exemplifying the delicate quality of the love-poems, we may take "Transcended," a short lyric expressive of the highest human love; allied to the dramatic narratives are his occasional ballads, such as "A Song of the Old Venetians."

In the past two or three years Mr. Rice has written a number of poems on Japanese subjects-poems which are, in effect, appreciations of the Japanese life, spirit, religion, and art. "Maya," for instance, expresses the ageless age of the Orient, while the inward look of the Eastern religions is intimated in the poem entitled "The Great Buddha of Kamakura to the Sphinx."

The body of Mr. Rice's lyrical verse is characterized by a feeling that is finely romantic-romantic in the highest sense of the word, which implies at its best, a profound and dominating sense of the wonder of life, the beauty of it, the glory and the passion. Of these qualities he is peculiarly aware, both in his lyrics and in his dramas.

Mr. Rice's plays, in their high spirit, in their feeling toward that lordly, passionate life which is the one element for poetic drama, in their excellence of build, and by reason of many passages of beauty, are comparable to those of Stephen Phillips, who led the modern way in this form of literature. Mr. Rice is one of our few present-day poets who have the steadiness, the weight, the substance, for a long, well-balanced, well-sustained drama. His first play, "Charles di Tocca," while, perhaps, not of such merit as the others, is excellent in motive and contains, in its latter part particularly, some passages of Elizabethan force and splendor.

This play, like "David" and like "Yolanda of Cyprus," has the motive, movement, and color of true romantic drama, which de