Twenty-five years ago, when my generation were beginning to find their way around in the world of print and paint, a group of us used to meet occasionally to share each other’s discoveries in contemporary thought and literature. You may smile at the association of the date 1904 and contemporary literature, and confessedly some of the objects of our attention were fantastic enough--Elbert Hubbard, Edward Howard Griggs, and even “I, Mary MacLane.” The more daring among us were delving in Haeckel and Henry George; our conservatives, according to their bents, delighted in Kipling and Barrie, or a group of alluring Celts, or became expert in discriminations between the earlier and the later manner of Henry James. We all read, of course, William James and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and Chesterton. In poetry, to be sure, we had no such variegated menu as the contemporary road-house affords; I should say that our diet was easily digestible and a little saccharine. For the most part, as I recall, we followed along the vagabondia trail after Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. In that old college town near the coast, we could still thrill to such verses as Three of us without a care In the red September Tramping down the roads of Maine, Making merry with the rain, With the fellow winds a-fare Where the winds remember. Frost and Sandburg, Lindsay and Masefield, had not come into our world--much less Walter de la Mare or Aldous Huxley or Robinson Jeffers. But we were not so entirely neglected by the contemporary muse as you may suppose. We knew the early work of Yeats, and “The Hound of Heaven” of Francis Thompson; we had discovered the sonnets of Santayana; we could repeat a large part of _A Shropshire Lad_; and of course for our more cosmic moods we had Walt Whitman. Hundreds of other such groups must have existed, like ours callow, inexperienced, bumptious, but very inquisitive, very receptive. Not against us did the “new poetry” (no longer such) have to hurl its bolts. And even in that distant, unreal decade of the nineteen-hundreds, before President Roosevelt, by a few kindly pages in the _Outlook_, put Edwin Arlington Robinson’s name into every one’s mouth, we knew the poet of “Tilbury Town” (only thirty miles from our own). There was one poem of his whose meaning used to be a great subject of dispute,--for we were than naïve enough to think that a poem must be susceptible of some rational explanation. It was entitled “Cortège,” and had appeared in the _Captain Craig_ volume of 1902.[45] Four o’clock this afternoon, Fifteen hundred miles away: So it goes, the crazy tune, So it pounds and hums all day. Four o’clock this afternoon, Earth will hide them far away: Best they go to go so soon, Best for them the grave to-day. Had she gone but half so soon, Half the world had passed away. Four o’clock this afternoon, Best for them they go to-day.