You see the novelist wants to explain himself also. He is a lover and so vividly does he love that he has the courage to love even himself. And so it is the lover that sits writing and the madness of the writer is the madness of the lover. As he writes he is making love. Surely all can understand that! Because sexual love is the most useful and common type of excitement we are apt to think it necessary to life, when the truth is that it is excitement itself which is life’s essential.—_Rebecca West._ Asperities MITCHELL DAWSON Threat If you should come into my cave Bringing molded beads of sunlight For offering— I would trample your beads And crush you With that great bone of darkness Which I have gnawed for years And which has left me Meagre as a gnarled root. In Passing One moment— Your friend Has squeezed great drops from you Upon his palette; With your color he has wrought— Masterpieces, you say? But the empty tube Grown flat in his hand, Will he hold it or pick up another, Your friend— Teresa Do you remember Antonino— Swift-winged, green in the sun? Into the snap-dragon throat of desire Flew Antonino. Snap!... The skeleton of Antonino has made A good husband, a good provider. Amy Lowell’s New Book F. S. FLINT Amy Lowell has sent me her book, _Six French Poets_,[2] who are: Emile Verhaeren, Albert Samain, Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Régnier, Francis Jammes, and Paul Fort; and it occurs to me that I must be her severest critic—are we not rivals? When, in the summer of 1914, before the war was dreamed of, she told me over her dinner-table of her intention to write this book and of the names of the poets she had chosen, I objected to Samain. Samain, I said, was exquisite, but not important; and he could only be read a few pages at a time without weariness. Stuart Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin, I went on, are both more considerable poets; and both are Americans; and since you insist on including Remy de Gourmont as one of your poets, you might increase your number to seven, in many ways an appropriate number where poets are concerned; and so on. But she only motioned the waiter to fill my glass with champagne; and what can a man do against such argument and such a will? And now, even if I wished to damn her book (I do not), she will have already heaped coals of fire upon my head in her preface, where she says kind things about me because I happened to mention the names of one or two books to her, information she did not really need. [2] _Six French Poets, by Amy Lowell. New York: Macmillan Company._