world—you alone have touched the new harmony—and it had to come from America. The New Republic is not doing it, nor _The Masses_, nor _The Unpopular_. Though they are great—they are of the old. Just to be true to your vision is all Heaven asks, and believe me one with you. I am just beginning, too. I want to belong—although I have ten years start. Great good to you—all. P. S. We have all loved the little milliner’s hat, and some of us have wept over it. ANOTHER NOTE ON PAROXYSM IN POETRY _Rex Lampman, Portland, Oregon_: Quoting Mr. Edward J. O’Brien’s instructive article in THE LITTLE REVIEW for January: “Paroxysm is the poetic expression of that modern spirit which finds its most notable expression in the sculpture of Meunier, the polyphonic music of Strauss, the philosophy of Bergson, and the American skyscraper.... It aims to attain and express, with the quick, keen vigor and strength of steel, the whirling, audacious, burning life of our epoch in all the paroxysm of the New Beauty.” Quoting the dictionary, a paroxysm is “any sudden, violent and uncontrollable action or emotion; a convulsion or fit.” The dictionary definition seems more nearly to apply to inspirational poetic effort, such as Poe had in mind when he advanced his theory that a long poem is an artistic impossibility; such an effort is as necessary to any truly poetic performance. Mr. O’Brien’s definition refers to a particular kind of poetic effort, which, to achieve its aims, also must be inspirational, and finds its inspiration in “modern industrial and mechanical effort,” rather than in all creation, free field for the poet of no prescribed and particular province. I am totally unacquainted with the sculpture of Meunier, almost as innocent of knowledge of Strauss’s music, and of Bergson I know but a little, but I have seen the American skyscraper clutching its black steel fingers toward the blue, amid the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of the pneumatic riveting hammers. Here in Portland the skyscraper is pre-empting one by one our views of the evergreen hills and the snowy mountains. Perhaps the other things Mr. O’Brien enumerates as paroxyst manifestations are shutting off our views of the eternal verities of life and the silent splendors of the soul—or rather, perhaps they symbolize the materialistic ideals that are walling us away from the things of the spirit. If we accept these paroxyst manifestations as art, and keep our eyes fixed on them, surely the infinite horizon, with its never-conquered boundaries always beckoning out and on, is lost to us.