Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/34

 thrill and tightening of resolution in some crisis, or in the presence of some fair marble image of a thought that keeps its beauty and serenity while we fret and fade. It may even have been at some vision, seen in the multitude of business, of a new republic revealed to the traveling imagination, like a shining city set on a hill in the flash of a midnight storm. Till life itself yields such moments less charily, it is incumbent upon the artist to send them as often as he can.

There came among us in war time an English poet whose face was as sad as his who from the Judecca climbed to see again delle cose belle che porta il ciel—the sky-borne beauty of the stars. He had been where his countrymen, fighting with incredible heroism, had suffered one of the most heart-breaking and bloody defeats in English history, His memory was seared with remembrance of the filth, waste, wounds, and screaming lunacy of the battlefront to which he was about to return. When someone asked him to write his name in a volume of his poems, he inscribed below it this line of his own verse:—

Why these days? Because in them we learn the final object of all our preparation. These days