There is a great beating of wheels And a rumble of ugly machines. The west-bound buses are full of men In grey clothes and hard hats, Holding up umbrellas Over their sallow faces As they return to the suburban rabbit-holes. The women-clerks Try to be brightly dressed; Now the wind makes their five-shilling-hats jump And the hat-pins pull their hair. When one is quite free, and curious, They are fascinating to look at— Poor devils of a sober hell. The shop-lamps and the street-lamps Send steady rayed floods of yellow and red light So that Oxford street is paved with copper and chalcedony. Church Walk, Kensington (Sunday Morning) The cripples are going to church. Their crutches beat upon the stones, And they have clumsy iron boots. Their clothes are black, their faces peaked and mean; Their legs are withered Like dried bean-pods. Their eyes are as stupid as frogs’. And the god, September, Has paused for a moment here Garlanded with crimson leaves. He held a branch of fruited oak. He smiled like Hermes the beautiful Cut in marble. A Great Pilgrim-Pagan GEORGE SOULE Shakespeare in red morocco seems always wan and pathetic. I see him looking gloomily out of his unread respectability, bored with his scholarly canonization and his unromantic owners. How he longs for the irresponsible days when he was loved or ignored for his own sake! Now he is forever imprisoned in marble busts and tortured in Histories of English Literature. There is no more tragic fate in the annals of imagination. Terrible is the vengeance taken by institutional culture on those who are great enough to command its admiration. Therefore, a genius who has not been tagged unduly by the pundits inspires me with a profound delicacy, in a sense akin to the reverence for a beautiful child. Here is a virtue which the world needs. One would like to proclaim it from the housetops. Yet there are the rabble, ready with their election-night enthusiasm, and the scholars, with their pompous niches. If one could only find all those whom the man himself would have selected as friends and whisper the right word in their ears! But, after all, we must speak in public, remembering that even misunderstanding is the birthright of the genius. It is better that power should be expressed in devious and unforeseen channels than not at all.