Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/913

Rh to lose an illusion. On the contrary, he assimilates new slogans, new causes, new enthusiasms with an incredible appetite and an iron digestion. There is something sublime about a nature that can celebrate, with blithe impartiality and equal vigour, John L. Sullivan, Prohibition, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Kerensky, Mary Pickford, localism, Americanism, Internationalism, Campbellism. On one page Lindsay exhorts us to Sew the Flags Together, an inspiring appeal which is preceded by the proudly patriotic information that

And (in Shantung) there is, in the three lines, a significant and astonishing assemblage:

This undeviating catholicity proves nothing so much as the fact that Lindsay is not, as he fondly believes, a politically-minded person, a reconstructive philosopher. In his ready admiration, he is a radiant, undiscriminating emotionalist; even when he thinks he thinks, it is strong feeling that impels him. And it is this very lack of intellectual finesse and hesitation that makes his religious rhymes so obviously robust. John Brown, one of our finest interpretations of native folk-lore and possibly the noblest poem Lindsay has achieved, is full of a reverent sonority. So is that strange tract, A Rhymed Address to All Renegade Campbellites Exhorting Them to Return. And the first of the Campbell trilogy, entitled My Fathers Came from Kentucky, is even more surprisingly. Observe this animated fragment: