this-all up and down the California coast and through the California mountains, in the wake of Stevenson through the South Sea Islands, and in Alaska, as a member of the famous Harriman party. He had lived, too, with simple people in the Islands and with our Indians, and with those yet earlier folk, our little feathered friends of field and grove, thus gaining a knowledge of life where life is most unhampered by artificialities and conventions.

It took Mr. Keeler two years to make this pilgrimage "around," and read his poems the world over. While in Japan, one of his poetic tales was translated into Japanese for the late emperor at the request of the court Master of Ceremonies, Mr. Nagasaki. In India, he was the guest of the poetess Sarajini Naidon at her home in Hyderabad, and recited for a distinguished company of her friends. In Florence, Italy, he recited at the historic Villa Savanarola, and while in England gave his first dance poem at the Theosophical summer school at Torquay.

These wide travel experiences in turn enriched his poetry, for Mr. Keeler has put into verse a bit of every land visited-some old folk story, some dramatic incident, some typical character. He can give entire programs, drawing his material solely from some one country, as the Islands, Japan, India, Egypt.

A summer in California, followed by a three year's stay in New York, has followed these world-wanderings. In the American metropolis he has again appeared before large audiences in a variety of programs-selections from his verse, in original plays, and as a reader for his dance poems.

These dance poems, or dance rhythms as they are also called, are a contribution to the play-side of life. They consist of poems declaimed with music, and accompanied with pantomimic dancing, thus uniting poetry with the fine sensuous joy there is in the throb of music, the dancer's charm and grace, the beauty of her swirling

draperies and the play of light and color.

"The Enchanted Forest" has had the most brilliant production of these dance poems. It was first given in the grand ball room of the Waldorf-Astoria, in one of the Moments Musicales series, under the patronage of Metropolitan artists. Mr. Keeler in costume was the reader. Four barefoot dancers from the studio of Florence Fleming Noyes enacted the pantomime to orchestral music composed for the poem by Miss Bertha Remick.

A background of rare old tapestries completed the setting, and the audience contained many people of note.

Miss Maud Madison has been the soloist dancer to interpret other dancepoems-"The Vampire," a bat dance; "Princess Papilio," a butterfly dance; "The Harper's Song of Iris," an Egyptian dance. The accompanying music is by Emil Rhodes.

Among the poetical plays produced during this time is "The Bird's Christmas Eve" (a play with a peace plea) given last Christmastide by the Orange Woman's Club; a Seneca Indian play, given at the estate of Mrs. Cooley Ward at Wyoming, near Rochester, N. Y., and "The Triumph of Light,' originally given in Berkeley and presented in the East at the Passiac, N. J., Unitarian Church.

Mr. Keeler has given recitals at Newport and Naragansett Pier, and in New York at Edison's Little Thimble Theatre, the White Cat Tea Shop (where he gave a fashionable series of dinner recitals), at Guido Bruno's "garret," a gathering place for artists, before a large number of schools and clubs, including the Theatre Club, the United Theatrical Association, the New York Teachers of Oratory Club, the Cosmos Club, the Pleiades Club and the University Forum of America. Everywhere, and all the time, he has met with success-made a good big "hit."

Various other people, too, are now reciting from Mr. Keeler's poems in New York. Miss Lois Fox and Mrs. Ralph Waldo Trine both recite from

"Elfin Songs of Sunland," and Mrs, Waldo Richards includes selections from Mr. Keeler in her readings from contemporaneous American poets. A number of his songs are also being heard. Miss Kittie Chatham sings many of them, and included four in her recent book of songs. Three of these were set to music by Harvey Loomis, and one, "Fairy Bells," by Mrs. Edith Simonds of Berkeley.

His book of child poems, "Elfin Songs of Sunland," brought out first in California, has been given a new edition, the Putnams being the publisher. Guido Bruno recently published a chap book, "Songs of the Cosmos," most of the edition unfortunately being destroyed by a fire in the storeroom.

Now comes "The Victory-Songs of Triumph," published by Laurence Gomme of New York, a man who has brought out much of poetry and drama. The expectations are that another book, "The Mirror of Manhattan," a series of interpretative pictures of the New York of to-day, will soon follow.

Mr. Keeler's friends and readers will find-and welcome-a few old, familiar poems in this new book, such as "The Dreamer and the Doer," "Faith and Works," "To My Boy (On His Birthday") "Man the Conqueror," etc., but the majority of the poems the public will see for the first time within its covers. They are short poems, mostly, and chiefly lyrics in the free form that Mr. Keeler uses almost altogether, and which has so much appeal to moderns. His cry is for freedom, and in his verse he takes what he is reaching out for-practices what he preaches. As "The Outlook" once said: "Mr. Keeler's verses have the real swing and rush, indicating a fulness and richness. of thought sometime difficult to condense by the rules of rhyme."

The poems selected for this new volume have the life of to-day for their subject matter, and, as he has put it, are "poems of No Man's Land," in contrast to his work that is decidedly national or provincial in character. "The Chant of Life To-day," "The Child Heart," "O Whence, O Whither

Charles Keeler as reader, in "The Enchanted Forest," given at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Soul," "Playing the Part," "A Masque of the City," so a few of the titles read, telling their own story.

They show Mr. Keeler as a prophet and a beauty lover; one who craves the truth, however sober or unsavory it may be; who holds all life sacred, that of a bird no less than a man; who stretches out an uplifting hand to the downtrodden and oppressed; who

No faster, no ascetic I-
"Tis good to live, to breathe
Deep draughts of fragrant morn,
Deep draughts of dewey night,

To eat sweet simples of the earth.
"To feel the tender touch of hands,
Communicable thrills awake
By their caress the throb of life
That leaps with meeting lips.
"So is my cry not death
But life! more life, replete
With all that sense can wring
Of beauty out of clay;
Full of the joy of light,
Of color and of sound,

Of redolence of flowers."

Here are passages that reflect the quest of an earnest soul for truth, and in that search doubt alike theologian and scientist.

"I crave the truth, stark, naked unashamed,

And should it smite me, let me face the pang,

Aye, turn the other cheek, and cry, again!

If I have coddled error to my breast,

Let me cast forth the viper ere it sting.

"But Gililee, the iconoclast, Not thus obesiance made to prejudice, When he spied out God's order in the skies,

And how the riven sun in pangs of birth

Cast from its side the world,

Not e'en the Inquisition's grim intent Could shake his proclamation of the truth.

"So Darwin to the scoffers made reply With piled facts no sophistry could shake,

His the new Genesis from nature's Bible,

Of creatures struggling through milleniums,

Through patient cycles of ascending forms.

"But Science is not God's elect disciple And many an error has she treasured fast

Beneath her academic cloak of smug conceit.

Ah, savants, be not overproud, I pray, There may be finer laws than you dissolve,

With microscope and telescope and spectrum,

More subtle forces than your prying eyes

Can penetrate amid the unknown dark. "What are your laws but visions of the

unseen Will?

What are your forces but the thinking of the perfect Mind?

So open wide your heart to His great light,

O seeker after truth."

Mr. Keeler is versatile, having a copious vocabulary and a wide range of subjects. He is a mystic, too, with a sense of the oneness of life here and "there." "With the Dead" strikingly brings this out; so does "The People of the Grave."

He is always an optimist, serene, yet at times tinged with something very much like fatalism. He says:

"Milleniums of life.

Through thee reverberate.
Uncounted cycles swing

Through thy pre-natal pulse;
Unreckoned aeon cast
Thy seed from life to life,
Fate plays at cards with thee,
Shuffles and cuts the pack
Through aeons ere thy birth,
And throws thee down upon the
board,

The last hand of the game." But he does not counsel passivity: "Ye cannot comprehend the cosmic plan,

So dare to walk erect and face the world.

of time. He sees the continuity of life through changing cycles and countless changing forms. His poetry is in fact permeated with a sense of relationship of the Now to all the Past and Present. It gives a big note, as many of the selections here quoted illustrate. Here is another with the far outreach:

"But what reck we of the glory of engines?

We cry for man's glory and the glory of the Lord.

Aye, the world is but clay to be shaped into beauty,

dles on the altar.

From the first to the last, in the earth and heavens,

One miracle only can thrill with its wonder

When God breathes on atoms, and lo! they are life,

When man breaks from matter, and lo! he is love!"

There are a few personal poems included in "The Victory." The one to his little son Leonarde has been mentioned; the others are to noted Califor

nians-Henry Holmes, the violinist; Ina Coolbrith, the poet; William Keith, the painter, and a close personal friend.

Among Mr. Keeler's other books of poetry are "A Season's Sowing," "A Wanderer's Songs of the Sea,” “Idyls of El Dorado," "Elfin Songs of Sunland," now in its second edition. He has out also quite a bit of prose. His "Bird Notes Afield" is an authority in its line, and has passed into several editions. "San Francisco and Thereabouts" is a well known volume, as is his "The Simple Home." "San Francisco Through Earthquake and Fire," "Southern California" and "Evolution of Color in the Birds of North America" are still other works from Mr. Keeler's facile pen.

He is a member of the Bohemian Club and wrote the Cremation of Care ceremony for the 1913 jinks. He is also a member of the Author's Club of London, and the New York Author's Club.