Then I woke softly, And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream, And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury, And all the songs of sopranos and tenors, And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervour, And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs, And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death, I said to my silent curious soul, out of the bed of the slumber-chamber, Come, for I have found the clue I sought so long, Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day, Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real, Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream. And I said, moreover, Haply, what thou hast heard O soul was not the sound of winds, Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh screams, Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy, Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor layers of harmonies, Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching soldiers, Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-call of camps, But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee, Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in the night air, uncaught, unwritten, Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.” There was never a bolder conclusion to a poem in the world. THE LION AND THE UNIFORM In _The Ordeal of Mark Twain_ Van Wyck Brooks studies the tragedy which he sees in the career of a genius who was born with the nature of a great artist but born into an environment so uncongenial to art that he had to struggle against it all his life, and vainly, except for a few radiant occasions when he escaped it rather by accident than by any natural sense of his best direction or any wisdom which he had been able to acquire. In “that dry, old, barren, horizonless Middle-West of ours,” according to Mr. Brooks, where in Mark Twain’s boyhood and youth the frontier had not yet lightened the hand of death which it always laid upon every uncomplacent urge toward art or creativeness or even distinction, Mark Twain had a smaller opportunity for free growth than he would have had on “the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe.” Moreover, not only his general environment but the individual who touched him most intimately contrived, however unwittingly, to clip and bind his instinctive wings. His mother, keen, spry, witty, energetic, but hungry for the love she had missed in her marriage and therefore insatiate in her maternal passions, checked all the impulses in her sensitive son which looked to her like eccentricities and tenderly hammered him into the only mould tolerated in Missouri—the mould of respectability and amiability. That he did not quite stay hammered is testimony to the strength of his desire, but it was never to become fully conscious. So, though his episode on the river as pilot partly liberated him, for there he had a craft and an authority which