Strange wares are handled on the wharves of sleep; Shadows of shadows pass, and many a light Flashes a signal fire across the night; Barges depart whose voiceless steersmen keep Their way without a star upon the deep; And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews, Come cries of incommunicable news, While cargoes pile the piers a moon-white heap— Budgets of dream-dust, merchandise of song, Wreckage of hope and packs of ancient wrong, Nepenthes gathered from a secret strand, Fardels of heartache, burdens of old sins, Luggage sent down from dim ancestral inns, And bales of fantasy from No-Man’s Land. Really, one does not every year meet with a finer blending of imagination and fancy than this; and I know not where to put a finger on two better lines in recent work than these: And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews, Come cries of incommunicable news. The reader to whom these strange lines do not give an actual physical thrill may rightly boast himself impregnable to poetic emotion and indocible to the meaning of it. Mr. Markham has said of Poetry—and said greatly: She comes like the hush and beauty of the night, And sees too deep for laughter; Her touch is a vibration and a light From worlds before and after. But she comes not always so. Sometimes she comes with a burst of music, sometimes with a roll of thunder, a clash of weapons, a roar of winds or a beating of billow against the rock. Sometimes with a noise of revelry, and again with the wailing of a dirge. Like Nature, she “speaks a various language.” Mr. Markham, no longer content, as once he seemed to be, with interpreting her fluting and warbling and “sweet jargoning,” learned to heed her profounder notes, which stir the stones of the temple like the bass of a great organ.