The verse of the Great War and that of the Civil War show one marked contrast. The best poetry of the recent titanic struggle is individualistic. It reflects the re-actions of personality to the stress and tension, the long-drawn, desperate drudgery, the tragedy, and sometimes the humor, of the strange experience. It pictures the dreams of home and peace. Most of the best of it has been written by young soldiers, many of whom were novices in the poetic rôle. On the whole the well-known poets did not come up to expectations. There were of course exceptions, but most of this recent verse, appealing and beautiful as it is, misses the higher vision, perhaps because the immediate scene and the personal experience were so overwhelming. The poets of our Civil War, however, were obsessed with the meaning of it all, with the hopes and fears for the country's future. Have we as yet anything in American verse about the Great War that we can place beside the best war poetry of Holmes and Whittier? Can we find sustained poetic inspiration that compares with Lowell's "Commemoration Ode"? Whereas to this recent conflict is the lyric power of the "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"? And, coming down to mere narrative and descriptive verse, what incident of this modern Armageddon has found among us its immortal ballad, as the battle of Mobile Bay found its eloquent poetic record in "The Bay Fight"? _X: The Temple of the Muses_ TO older citizens the Wadsworth Atheneum has an especial and peculiar charm. Doubtless more recent residents also feel this attraction, but it is natural that to those who as children lived in its shadow, as it were, the appeal should be strongest. Here we were wont to go on rainy afternoons to look at the illustrated papers in the reading room. In the historical society's quarters upstairs it used to give one a peculiar thrill to sit on the link of the chain which during the Revolution was stretched across the Hudson at West Point, and which we had read about in the "Boys of 'Seventy-Six." There was, too, a certain ghastly emotional experience to be derived from an inspection of the sword holes, just over the heart, in the waistcoat and shirt of Colonel Ledyard. Then there were those Saturday mornings spent with the good friend of all children in the weekly proceedings at the Atheneum of the old "Agassiz Association." In those days we were reading "Kenilworth" and "Woodstock" and the castellated structure acquired in our minds a quality of mystery and romance. Certain precincts of the building were denied us and an impression gained credence that somewhere in the edifice, the plan of which we never fathomed, were secret rooms, passages and staircases. Certainly if ghosts walked anywhere the place where you would be most likely to find them was on some Hallowe'en midnight among these relics of the past. But we never got in at midnight--in fact nothing could have persuaded us to attempt such an entry.