Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/56

POETRY: A Magazine of Verse she is playing with plaster for an hour of gladness? In these festal cities the arts try their experiments; the Centennial, the Columbian, each began an epoch, and no doubt the Panama-Pacific will prove also a far-reaching influence. Our sculptors have learned much since ninety-three, especially in their decorative reliefs; more than our mural painters, for Mr. Brangwyn's brilliant panels, badly placed as they are, far out-distance even the lovely pediments of Mr. Flassam and Mr. Holloway, the best of the Americans. But the sculptors were given a free field, while the painters had a narrow one.

The night transfigured all this, of course, and added sometimes a new beauty. But there was too little night—night was brighter than day in the great courts, and even the fireworks were lit up with search-lights. Night should not be banished by a glare in such a pageant, but emphasized by soft lights discreetly used, so that its mystery enfolds and enhances great buildings.

The little old Spanish San Diego exposition is a thing of perfect unity and charm. For me it will always possess two magic memories. I had been told to stay out-of-doors, but in the beautiful California Building I found, in the superb reproductions of Maya sculpture and architecture from Yucatan, the revelation of a new grand style, a style utterly unlike Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Gothic, or any other system of design hitherto known to history, but like them original, authoritative, and inspired. I was feeling like stout Cortez, with a new world swimming in my ken—what a marvelous