Some of these commissioners raise the objection that motor busses will add seriously to the traffic congestion. That is true, but how is the thing managed in New York? Fifth Avenue is narrower than Michigan, and it is always more crowded. Other commissioners object to the wear and tear on the boulevards which have not been constructed for such heavy traffic. But the Chicago Motor Bus Company “has agreed to pay the Lincoln Park Commissioners $1,300 a year for each mile of their route and the South Park Commissioners $1,000 a year per mile.” The thing that really halts the plan at present is the attitude of a couple of private citizens who complain to the South Park Board that motor busses will destroy the beauty of the boulevards! You know the type of mind whose thinking runs in such channels? The type that doesn’t give a hang who pays the taxes which maintain the boulevards; the type that is fond of talking about democracy and what great things we do for the foreigner in America. Of the men who rhyme, so large a number are cursed with suburban comforts. A villa and books never made a poet; they do but tend to the building up of the respectable virtues; and for the respectable virtues poetry has but the slightest use. To roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, to haunt the strange corners of cities, to know all the useless and improper, and amusing people who are alone very much worth knowing; to live, as well as to observe life; or, to be shut up in hospital, drawn out of the rapid current of life into a sordid and exasperating inaction; to wait, for a time, in the ante-room of death; it is such things as these that make for poetry. —_Arthur Symons._ Poems RICHARD ALDINGTON Bloomsbury Square I walk round Bloomsbury Square. Bright sky over Bloomsbury Square; Bright fluttering leaves Between the sober houses. I carry my morning letters, Some telling of lives spoiled and cramped, Some telling of lives hopeful and gay, Some full of yearning for London And our wider life. In Bloomsbury Square The worms of a little moth Are spinning their Cocoons, Weaving them out of bright yellow silk And bits of plane bark Into strong, comfortable houses. But hundreds of them Have wandered on to the iron fence And go wearily wandering, Spending a little silk here And a little silk there, And at last dropping dead from weariness.... “Our wider life”— That is our wider life: To wander like blind worms Spending our fine useless golden silk And at last dropping dead from weariness. Blue sky over Bloomsbury Square; Bright fluttering leaves Between the sober houses. Epigram