Mrs. Wilkinson is also the author of _New Voices_ (1919), a series of essays on contemporary verse, reinforced with liberal quotations from both English and American poets. BEFORE DAWN IN THE WOODS Upon our eyelids, dear, the dew will lie, And on the roughened meshes of our hair, While little feet make bold to scurry by And half-notes shrilly cut the quickened air. Our clean, hard bodies, on the clean, hard ground Will vaguely feel that they are full of power, And they will stir, and stretch, and look around, Loving the early, chill, half-lighted hour. Loving the voices in the shadowed trees, Loving the feet that stir the blossoming grass— Oh, always we have known such things as these, And knowing, can we love and let them pass? _Harry Kemp_ Harry (Hibbard) Kemp, known as “the tramp-poet,” was born at Youngstown, Ohio, December 15, 1883. He came East at the age of twelve, left school to enter a factory, but returned to high school to study English. A globe-trotter by nature, he went to sea before finishing his high school course. He shipped first to Australia, then to China, from China to California, from California to the University of Kansas. After a few months in London in 1909 (he crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway) he returned to New York City, where he has lived ever since, founding his own theater in which he is actor, stage-manager, playwright and chorus. Kemp’s first book was a play, _Judas_ (1910), a reversion of the biblical figure along the lines of Paul Heyse’s _Mary of Magdala_. His first collection of poems, _The Cry of Youth_ (1914), like the subsequent volume, _The Passing God_ (1919), is full of every kind of poetry except the kind one might imagine Kemp would write. Instead of crude and boisterous verse, here is a precise and almost over-polished poetry. Kemp has, strangely enough, taken the classic formalists for his models—one can even detect the whispers of Pope and Dryden in his lines. _Chanteys and Ballads_ (1920) is riper and more representative. The notes are more varied, the sense of personality is more pronounced. STREET LAMPS Softly they take their being, one by one, From the lamp-lighter’s hand, after the sun Has dropped to dusk ... like little flowers they bloom Set in long rows amid the growing gloom. Who he who lights them is, I do not know, Except that, every eve, with footfall slow And regular, he passes by my room And sets his gusty flowers of light a-bloom. A PHANTASY OF HEAVEN