And so Emma Goldman continues her work, talking passionately to crowds of people, sickened by audiences who listen merely out of curiosity, disheartened by the vapid applause of those who make their own incapacities the burden of their rebellion, heartbroken by the masses who cannot respond to any ideal, cheered by the few who understand, dedicated to an eternal hope of new values. This is the real Emma Goldman—a visionist, if you will, but at the same time a woman with a deep faith in the superiority of reality to imagination. How she has lived life! How gallantly she makes the big out of the little and accepts without complaining the perverted role which has been thrust at her. To have seen her in her home with its hundreds of books and its charming old pictures of Ibsen and Tolstoy and Nietzsche and Kropotkin; to have seen her friends, her nephews and nieces offering her their high adoration; to have watched her gigantic tenderness, her gorgeous flinging away of self on every possible pretext; to have listened with her to great music in a kind of cosmic hush that music is made by and for such spirits; to have heard her, “the crucified,” talk of the ideal she cherishes and how her expression of it has been so far below her dream; to have compared her, an artist in life, as incapable of spiritual vulgarity as a Rodin or a Beethoven, with a sensitiveness which makes her almost fear beauty, with a sweetness that is overwhelming—to compare her with the vulgarians who denounce her is to fall into a mad rage and long to insult them desperately. I said before that Emma Goldman was the most challenging spirit in America. But she is so much more than that: she is many wonderful things which this article merely touches upon, because it is impossible to express them all. Science is after all but a reassuring and conciliatory expression of our ignorance.—_Maeterlinck._ Poems MAXWELL BODENHEIM Expressions of a Child’s Face Dawn?—no, the stunted transparency of dawn— Color taken from the birth of a white throat And shaken in a still cup till it gradually reaches strength A sudden scattering of strained light— The smile has lived and seemed to die. Thought?—no, the invisible shudder of a perfume Trying to leave the shadowy pain of a flesh-flower A whisp of it whips itself away, And leaves the rest—a cool, colorless struggle. Sadness?—no, the growth of a pale inclination Which knows not what it is; Which tries to form the beginning of a swift question, But has not yet developed trim lips. And then what seems a smile But is the sleeping body of a laugh. It almost awakes, and throws out Long breaths, in a green and yellow din. Emotions I