A flippant friend once told me that he had never had the courage to read William Vaughn Moody because the poet had such a dark brown name. That is important because of its triviality. I have no doubt that if the gospel hymns had never been written, and if we had never on gloomy Sunday evenings seen those pale books with the scroll-work Moody-and-Sankey covers, bringing all their dismal train of musical and religious doggerel, we should have been spared many misgivings about the evangelist’s vicarious name-sake. Let it be firmly understood, therefore, that there is nothing dark brown, or evangelistic, or stupidly sober-serious about the new poet of the Fire-Bringer. May he never go into a household-classics edition! But there is a tinge of New England about him, just the same. Only one who has in his blood the solemn possibilities of religious emotion can react against orthodox narrowness without becoming trivial. It is the fashion to blame all modern ills on puritan traditions. We should be wise if in order to fight our evils we should invoke a little of the Pilgrim Fathers’ heroism. Too many of us take up the patter of radicalism with as little genuine sincerity as a spearmint ribbon-clerk repeats the latest Sunday-comic slang. If you have ever walked over a New England countryside the endless miles of stone walls may have set you thinking. Every one of those millions of stones has been laboriously picked out of the fields—and there are still many there. Before that the trees had to be cleared away, and the Indians fought, and the ocean crossed without chart or government buoy. For over two centuries our ancestors grimly created our country for us, with an incessant summer- and winter-courage that seems the attribute of giants. What wonder if they were hard and narrow? We scoff at their terminal morraine; but we should be more deserving of their gift if we should emulate their stout hearts in clearing away the remaining debris from the economical and spiritual fields. In spite of injurious puritan traditions there is something inalienably American and truly great about old New England. It is the same unafraid stoutness of heart that is at the bottom of Moody’s personality. It gives him power; it gives him unconscious dignity.