Despite occasional faults in form or stress--and we must remember that Giovannitti is writing in an alien tongue--the poems are vibrant with life and some of them express with truest art things which are not always considered by our academic friends to be at all within the province of poetry. Sometimes the formal verse forms are used and, at other times, the poet has recourse to the free rhythmic mode of Whitman. Personally, I think that the best work is in the free verse. _The Walker_, a jail experience of Giovannitti's, is a wonderful piece of work and should be bracketed with _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_. The finest thing in the book is _The Cage_, a poem which appeared originally in _The Atlantic Monthly_, and which is one of the few things which have preserved that journal from irredeemable mediocrity. _The Cage_ expresses the thoughts and emotions of the writer when he stood with his two comrades in the dock of Salem courthouse. The contrast is drawn between the outworn formalities and rites of the law and the lusty life of labor,--between the dead lives of the dismal practitioners of a stilted and tyrannical formula and the life of vigorous conflict of the awakening working-class. This is the inside of the court-room: In the middle of the great greenish room stood the green iron cage. All was old, and cold and mournful, ancient with the double antiquity of heart and brain in the great greenish room, Old and hoary was the man who sat upon the faldstool, upon the fireless and godless altar, Old were the tomes that mouldered behind him on the dusty shelves. Old was the man upon his left who awoke with his cracked voice the dead echoes of dead centuries, old the man upon his right who wielded a wand; and old all those who spoke to him and listened to him before and around the green iron cage. Old were the words they spoke, and their faces were drawn and white and lifeless, without expression or solemnity; like the ikons of old cathedrals. For of naught they knew, but of what was written in the old, yellow books. And all the joys and the pains and the loves and hatreds and furies and labors and strifes of man, all the fierce and divine passions that battle and rage in the heart of man, never entered into the great greenish room but to sit in the green iron cage. Senility, dullness and dissolution were all around the green iron cage, and nothing was new and young and alive in the great room, except the three men who were in the cage. And, then, when the prosecutor speaks, we have an insight into the fervor with which Giovannitti greets the overthrow of the old and the budding of the new: