And so it is, that beginning with his poems of youth, John Masefield starts out with a sympathetic social consciousness, but nothing more apparently. He brothers with the outcast and frankly prefers it. Then comes the great regenerating influence in his life, which we surely find in his expression of faith that the soul is immortal, and finally that upheaval which we call conversion with all of its incident steps from conviction of sin to repentance; and then to the consciousness of forgiveness; to the lighted mind and the lighted soul; and then to the uprooting of evil and the planting of good in the soil of his life. And so through Saul Kane we see John Masefield and have an explanation of that subtle yet revolutionary change in his life and his poetry, pregnant with illustrations that, to quote another English poet, Noyes, "Would make the dead arise!" VIII ROBERT SERVICE, POET OF VIRILITY [Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used by permission, and are taken from the following works: The Spell of the Yukon; Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, published by Barse & Hopkins, New York; Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, published by Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.] A STUDY OF HIGH PEAKS AND HIGH HOPES; OF WHITE SNOWS AND WHITE LIVES; OF SIN AND DEATH; OF HEAVEN AND GOD A preacher once preached a sermon, and in the opening moments of this sermon he quoted eight lines, and a layman said at the conclusion of this sermon, "Ah, the sermon was fine, but those lines that you quoted--they were tremendous; they gripped me!" And those lines were from Robert Service, the poet of the Alaskan ice-peaks, of the Yukon's turbulent blue waters, of the great silences, of the high peaks and high hopes; of men and gold and sin and death. And the lines that gripped the layman were: "I've stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow That's plumb-full of hush to the brim; I've watched the big husky sun wallow In crimson and gold, and grow dim; Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming And the stars tumbled out neck and crop; And I've thought that I surely was dreaming With the peace o' the world piled on top." The Spell of the Yukon. [Illustration: ROBERT SERVICE.] Everything that the great northland holds was dear to him and clear to him and near to him. He knew it all as intimately as a child knows his own backyard. He makes it as dear and near and clear too, to those who read: "The summer--no sweeter was ever, The sunshiny woods all athrill; The grayling aleap in the river, The bighorn asleep on the hill; The strong life that never knows harness, The wilds where the caribou call; The freedom, the freshness, the farness; O God! how I'm stuck on it all!" The Spell of the Yukon.