Don’t sneer at my incurable sentimentality, you happy normal. The tragedy of Alexander Berkman is common to all of us, transplanted wild flowers. It is the tragedy of getting the surrogate for the real thing. Berkman and the Girl passionately kissing the allegorical figure of the Social Revolution—isn’t this the symbol of the empty grey life in this normal land? What do you offer the seeking, striving, courageous souls but surrogates, substitutes? Your radicals—they are nauseating! They chatter about Nietzsche and Stirner and Whitman, wave the red flag and scream about individual freedom; but let one of them transgress the seventh commandment or commit any thing that is not _comme il faut_ according to their code, and lo, the radicalism has evaporated, and the atavistic mouldy morality has come to demonstrate its wrinkled face. Has not John Most repudiated the act of his disciple, Berkman, because it was a _real_ act and not a paper allegory? Of course, Most was German.... Hush! Were we not going to observe in silence the purple-crimson crucifixion of autumnal Phoebus? I have been as silent as the Barber of Scheherezade. Woe me, the Incurable! IBN GABIROL. Sufficience HELEN HOYT I wish no guardian angel: I do not seek fairies in the trees: The trees are enough in themselves. On Poetry Aesthetics and Common-Sense LLEWELLYN JONES Poetry, we are often told, cannot be defined but—by way of consolation—can always be recognized. Unfortunately the latter half of that statement seems no longer true, especially of latter-day poetry. Fratricidal strife between makers of _vers libre_ and formalists goes on merrily, while the people whose contribution to poetry is their appreciation of it—and purchase of it—are not unnaturally playing safe and buying Longfellow in padded ooze. I always thought I could recognize authentic poetry on most themes and even flattered myself that I had some little understanding of the psychology of its production. Latterly two voices have come to me, one affirming that I was right in my prejudice that all durable verse should have content as well as form, should have meaning as well as sound—though in closest union with the sound,—that, in short, the poet should be a thinker as well as a craftsman; an emotional thinker, of course, if that term be permitted, but not a mere clairaudient wielder of words. And then I heard a voice which bid me forget all that and list to Long breaths, in a green and yellow din.