So came the Captain with the mighty heart; And when the judgment thunders split the house, Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest, He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again The rafters of the Home. He held his place— Held the long purpose like a growing tree— Held on through blame and faltered not at praise. And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs, Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, And leaves a lonesome place against the sky. _C. E. S. Wood_ Charles Erskine Scott Wood was born at Erie, Pennsylvania, February 20, 1852, educated at the United States Military Academy (1874) and Columbia, where he received the degrees of Ph.B. and LL.B. in 1883. Wood served in the United States Army for almost ten years, acting as lieutenant in various campaigns against the Indians during 1877–8. He was admitted to the bar in 1884, practised at Portland, Oregon, and retired in 1919. In 1901, he published _A Book of Tales, Being Myths of the North American Indians_. In 1904, his symbolic _A Masque of Love_ appeared. His finest work, however, is _The Poet in the Desert_ (1915), a sonorous pageant of protest from which the two selections have been taken. SUNRISE The lean coyote, prowler of the night, Slips to his rocky fastnesses. Jack-rabbits noiselessly shuttle among the sage-brush, And, from the castellated cliffs, Rock-ravens launch their proud black sails upon the day. The wild horses troop back to their pastures. The poplar-trees watch beside the irrigation-ditches. Orioles, whose nests sway in the cotton-wood trees by the ditch-side, begin to twitter. All shy things, breathless, watch The thin white skirts of dawn, The dancer of the sky, Who trips daintily down the mountain-side Emptying her crystal chalice.... And a red-bird, dipped in sunrise, cracks from a poplar’s top His exultant whip above a silver world. THE DESERT She is a nun, withdrawing behind her veil; Grey, mysterious, meditative, unapproachable. Her body is tawny with the eagerness of the Sun And her eyes are pools which shine in deep canyons. She is a beautiful swart woman With opals at her throat, Rubies at her wrists And topaz about her ankles. Her breasts are like the evening and the day stars.