But do we accept them? Beyond the skyscrapers are the quiet hills, and however we throw ourselves into the vortices of cities, however often we go down among the red-mouthed, roaring furnaces, however we may acquiesce in, and even exult in and exalt, the materialistic horrors that multiply around us like monsters in a steamy primal fen, deep in ourselves we know that all these things are vain and vanishing, and that the actual and enduring lie outside and beyond, or within ourselves. The skyscraper is a monument to the Moloch of Rent. The furnaces are those of Baal, in which we give our souls as well as those of our children for sacrifice. “The evolution of poetry is to be as rapid and terrible henceforth as material evolution,” says M. Nicholas Beauduin, as quoted by Mr. O’Brien. No, the gods will not forbid it, for it is their way to let things run their courses. Doubtless there were singers, when Babylon was building, who insisted that a new poetry was necessary to celebrate the city, with its walls and towers and the efficient wonder of its sewer system, if it had one. Perhaps these poets, blinking in the glare of the furnaces and confused by the thunder of the shops whence issued the swords and spears and war-chariots, said to each other, “These are the supremest things, the worth-while things, and we must sing of them or be out of date.” And a paroxyst school was born. But always the heart of man has yearned toward things other than the works of his hands. When the walls and towers and spears and chariots have returned to the earth from which they were fashioned, there still endured the love for those other things, and the joy in their artistic expression. The springtime, banal as it is as a poetic subject, will remain forever more pleasing to the singer and his audience than can any paroxysm, of however “scientific technique,” proclaiming in “swift, hurtling, dynamic rhythms” the clamor and clangor of an armor-plate factory or the din and danger of a textile-mill. The earth is our mother, and hers are our deepest yearnings, first and last. “She waits for each and all.”