It is for some such need as this that THE LITTLE REVIEW exists: to create some attitude which so far is absolutely alien to the American tradition. I have been going to the lectures of John Cowper Powys, which are spoken of in other places in this issue, and that appreciative man gave me an interesting idea the other day. I should like to see him as editor of a literary magazine whose policy was to cut off the subscription list everybody who speculated about his pose or his insincerity and failed to miss the great beauty of his words. Now Mr. Powys is as unstable as water: that is his value. He feels entirely too much ever to be fully sane. His hypothetical magazine would gather an audience that could fight successfully the great American crime which may be described briefly as _missing the point_. Thus we might establish a reign of imagination which would make stupid things as impossible as cruel things, which would consider a failure to catch some new beauty or a “moral lynching of great and independent spirits” as greater crimes than murdering a man in a dark corner. On this basis we shall continue. If we must be sensible at least we shall make it, in Shaw’s phrase, an ecstasy of common sense. And out of all this chaos shall we produce our dancing star. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is right.—_Oscar Wilde._ Before the scientific spirit can reach its full bloom, it will have to acquire an honest sense of the rôle that fantasy plays in all its work. This is especially true of the social sciences. We are just beginning to realize the importance in economics of the economist’s utopia. We are learning the determining influence of the thinker’s dream.—_Walter Lippmann._ Poems AMY LOWELL Bright Sunlight The wind has blown a corner of your shawl Into the fountain, Where it floats and drifts Among the lily-pads Like a tissue of sapphires. But you do not heed it, Your fingers pick at the lichens On the stone edge of the basin, And your eyes follow the tall clouds As they sail over the ilex trees. Ely Cathedral Anaemic women, stupidly dressed and shod In squeaky shoes, thump down the nave to laud an expurgated God. Bunches of lights reflect upon the pavement where The twenty benches stop, and through the close, smelled-over air Gaunt arches push up their whited cones, And cover the sparse worshipers with dead men’s stones. Behind his shambling choristers, with flattened feet And red-flapped hood, the Bishop walks, complete In old, frayed ceremonial. The organ wheezes A moldy psalm-tune, and a verger sneezes. But the great Cathedral spears into the sky Shouting for joy. What is the red-flapped Bishop praying for, by the bye?