along the wall," and welcome the "Thawing Wind" to

Scatter poems on the floor;

Turn the poet out of door.

His New England world, too, is so solid that, once in, you must more than stir your stumps to get out. The mended walls cannot be willed away; the upland pastures lure to vagrancy with bird and flower; the roads wind farther in, and neighbors, hoe-blades up or reins down, must stop to talk. Then there are the grey houses, too wonted to toil and tragedy, yet dear with love.

Of all such things the poet gossips humanly, or he becomes their sober chronicler, and only rarely sings. "Flower-Gathering" is pure song, beginning thus:

I left you in the morning,
And in the morning glow,
You walked a way beside me

To make me sad to go.

Do you know me in the gloaming,

Gaunt and dusty grey with roaming?

Are you dumb because you know me not,

Or dumb because you know?

Personal and playful, but could any questioning probe more deeply into the heart of love-or God?

Something in "Flower-Gathering" recalls the wistful intimacy of "In the Home Stretch," a poem that should not be passed over because it seems but a too realistic picture of moving-day. Here it is an old farmhouse that is moved into, which is to be made-or not?-into an old home. Savor the

realism first:

Again

The house was full of tramping, and the dark
Door-filling men burst in and seized the stove.
A cannon-mouth-like hole was in the wall,
To which they set it true by eye; and then
Came up the jointed stovepipe in their hands,
So much too light and airy for their strength
It almost seemed to come ballooning up,
Slipping from clumsy clutches toward the ceiling.
"A fit!" said one, and banged a stovepipe shoulder.
"It's good luck when you move in to begin
With good luck with your stovepipe. Never mind,
It's not so bad in the country, settled down,

When people 're getting on in life. You'll like it."

The men go, and with the Two left alone we come to the heart of the story. She says:

"Dumped down in paradise we are and happy."

He answers:

"It's all so much what I have always wanted,
I can't believe it's what you wanted, too."
"Shouldn't you like to know?"

If it is what you wanted, then how much
You wanted it for me."

"I'd like to know

Can either know until the years shall answer? The poem ends:

When there was no more lantern in the kitchen,

The fire got out through crannies in the stove
And danced in yellow wrigglers on the ceiling,

As much at home as if they'd always danced there.1

The poet puts in our hand the key to "My November Guest" in the explicit words, "He is in love with being misunderstood," but the poem itself helps us to understand the uses of what seems adversity:

My sorrow, when she's here with me,

Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,

The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know

The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,

And they are better for her praise.'

'From Mountain Interval, Henry Holt & Co., 1921. "From A Boy's Will, 1915.

One more poem, "Revelation," and we shall know our November host:

We make ourselves a place apart

Behind light words that tease and flout,

But oh, the agitated heart

Till someone find us really out.

'Tis pity if the case require

(Or so we say) that in the end We speak the literal to inspire The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,

So all who hide too well away

Must speak and tell us what they are.

THE NATIONAL LETTERS

By H. L. MENCKEN

We have, as every one knows, produced no such "new and greater literatus order" as that announced by Prophecies old Walt. We have given a gaping world no unfulfilled books that "radiate," and surely none intelligibly comparable to stars and constellations. We have achieved no prodigies of the first class, and very few of the second class, and not many of the third and fourth classes. Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much is chief- Our literary ly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity mediocrity. Its typical great man, in our own time, has been Howells, as its typical great man a generation ago was Lowell, and two generations ago, Irving. Viewed largely, its salient character appears as a sort of timorous flaccidity, an amiable hollowness. In bulk it grows more and more formidable, in ease and decorum it makes undoubted progress, and on the side of mere technic, of the, bald capacity to write, it shows an ever-widening competence. But when one proceeds from such agencies and externals to the intrinsic substance, to the creative passion within, that substance quickly reveals itself as thin and watery, and

From Prejudices: Second Series, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, authorized publisher.

Henry Louis Mencken was for some years a reporter and then an editor in his native city, Baltimore; he is now an editor of Smart Set and a contributing editor of the Nation. He has written many books, including studies of Nietzsche and Shaw. His The American Language was published in 1918; his Prejudices, first, second, and third series, have appeared 1919 to 1922. Mr. Mencken has frequently castigated the American college professor-but "more in sorrow than in anger"-for reasons which are stated in that part of "The National Letters" which I have refrained from quoting. "All my instincts are on the side of the professors," he explains. (Prejudices: Second Series. Knopf, 1920, pp. 81-82). "I esteem a man who devotes himself to a subject with hard diligence; I esteem even more a man who puts poverty and a shelf of books above profiteering and evenings of jazz; I am naturally monkish. Moreover, there are more Ph. D.'s on my family tree than even a Boston bluestocking can boast; there was a whole century when even the most ignorant of my house was at least Juris utriusque Doctor. But such predispositions should not be permitted to color sober researches."-Well, Mr. Mencken does find things out, and then the public hears of them.

that passion fades to something almost puerile. In all that mass of suave and often highly diverting writing there is no visible movement toward a distinguished and singular excellence, a signal national quality, a ripe and stimulating flavor, or, indeed, toward any other describable goal. What one sees is simply a general irresolution, a pervasive superficiality. There is no sober grappling with fundamentals, but only a shy sporting on the surface; there is not even any serious approach, such as Whitman dreamed of, to the special experiences and emergencies of the American people. When one turns to any other national literature-to Russian literature, say, or French, or German or Scandinavian-one is conscious immediately of a definite attitude toward the primary mysteries of existence, the unsolved and ever-fascinating problems at the bottom of human life, and of a definite way of translating their challenge into drama. These attitudes and preoccupations raise a literature above mere poetizing and tale-telling; they give it dignity and importance; above all, they give it national character. But it is precisely here that the literature of America, and especially the later literature, is most colorless and inconsequential. As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials. One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability, a submergence of matter in manner-in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.

It was so in the great days and it is so today. There has always been hope and there has always been failure. Even the most optimistic prophets of future glories have been united, at all times, in their discontent with the here and now. "The mind of this country," said Emerson, speaking of what was currently visible in 1837, "is taught to aim at low objects.

There is no work for any but the decorous and the