Part 45 (2/2)

The trouble with minor poets is well set forth by Conrad Aiken in The Dial, who refers to the conclusions of M. Nicolas Kostyleff after a tentative study of the mechanism of poetic inspiration: ”An important part in poetic creation, he maintains, is an automatic verbal discharge, along chains of a.s.sociation, set in motion by a chance occurrence.”

POETRY.

(_Lord Dunsany._)

What is it to hate poetry? It is to have no little dreams and fancies, no holy memories of golden days, to be unmoved by serene midsummer evenings or dawn over wild lands, singing or suns.h.i.+ne, little tales told by the fire a long while since, glow-worms and briar rose; for of all these things and more is poetry made. It is to be cut off forever from the fellows.h.i.+p of great men that are gone; to see men and women without their halos and the world without its glory; to miss the meaning lurking behind the common things, like elves hiding in flowers; it is to beat one's hands all day against the gates of Fairyland and to find that they are shut and the country empty and its kings gone hence.

Why is it that in nearly all decisions of the Supreme court the most interesting opinions are delivered by the dissenting justices?

”New Jack-a-Bean dining room furniture, used two months; will sell cheap.”--El Paso Herald.

That is the kind that Louis Canns has his apartment furnished with.

A CHANGE FROM LATIN ROOTS.

[From the Reedsburg, Wis., Free Press.]

Miss Edna White resumed her school duties after a week's vacation for potato digging.

OUR FAVORITE AUTUMN POEM.

(_By a New Jersey poetess._)

Autumn is more beautiful, I think, Than Spring or Winter are.

For then trees change at the river's brink-- How beautiful they are.

I love to see the different colors so bright-- That grow around brooks & grottoes.

Leaves that are pressed are a pleasant sight To make photograph frames & mottoes.

Dr. Johnson or somebody said that a surgical operation was necessary to get a joke into a Scotchman's head; but the Glasgow Herald, reporting the existence of a London detective named Leonard Jolly Death, conjectures that it was probably an ancestor of his who was drowned in the b.u.t.t of Malmsey wine.

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