Yet all the precedent is on my side: I know that winter death has never tried The earth but it has failed; the snow may heap In long storms an undrifted four feet deep As measured against maple, birch and oak; It cannot check the Peeper’s silver croak; And I shall see the snow all go down hill In water of a slender April rill That flashes tail through last year’s withered brake And dead weeds like a disappearing snake. Nothing will be left white but here a birch And there a clump of houses with a church. _William Ellery Leonard_ William Ellery Leonard was born at Plainfield, New Jersey, January 25, 1876. He received his A.M. at Harvard in 1899 and completed his studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn. After traveling for several years throughout Europe, he became a teacher and has been professor of English in the University of Wisconsin since 1906. _The Vaunt of Man_ (1912) is Leonard’s most representative volume. Traditional in form and material, it is anything but conservative in spirit. Leonard’s insurrectionary fervor speaks sonorously in the simplest of his quatrains and the strictest of his sonnets. This protesting passion is given an even wider sweep in _The Lynching Bee_ (1920), the title-poem being a terrific indictment in which the poet’s outrage speaks with a new ironism. Besides his original poetry, Leonard has published several volumes of translations from the Greek and Latin as well as a series of paraphrases of the fables of Æsop. THE IMAGE OF DELIGHT O how came I that loved stars, moon, and flame, And unimaginable wind and sea, All inner shrines and temples of the free, Legends and hopes and golden books of fame; I that upon the mountain carved my name With cliffs and clouds and eagles over me, O how came I to stoop to loving thee— I that had never stooped before to shame? O ’twas not thee! Too eager of a white Far beauty and a voice to answer mine, Myself I built an image of delight, Which all one purple day I deemed divine— And when it vanished in the fiery night, I lost not thee, nor any shape of thine. TO THE VICTOR Man’s mind is larger than his brow of tears; This hour is not my all of time; this place My all of earth; nor this obscene disgrace My all of life; and thy complacent sneers Shall not pronounce my doom to my compeers While the Hereafter lights me in the face, And from the Past, as from the mountain’s base, Rise, as I rise, the long tumultuous cheers.