After centuries, after wasted ink and paper, the thundering, the fault-finding of teachers, we know no more about words than the Attic Greeks, centuries before the birth of Christ. No more did I say? We do not know as much. The age of Attic splendor antidated, I believe, the Birth of the Saviour by some five hundred years. In nobility of form, in beauty of tone, they are masters. We do not learn easily. I wonder if beauty is a pagan thing which Christianity helped to kill? Has anything so supremely lovely been done since? And I am quoting at random, and always from memory. Memory, of course, is not a storehouse for so great a treasure as the past. They say the cedars of Lebanon can not grow in the modern world. There is something that kills them as soon as the city, modern civilization, begin to approach. Their last stronghold is the slopes of the Atlas Mountains in Africa. Now they tell us, the French, who are trying to change ways of living there, that few young trees are springing up and the old are showing rapid signs of decay, the same decay that ruined their beauty in the Holy Land. _The Cedars of Lebanon and Beauty!_ Can they exist only in a pre-Christian world? It will never be possible to harmonize the Hellenic and the Hebraic spirit. There has been no poet in these calm centuries of Catholic Spain to compare in quality with the poets under reign of the Moor, and the proud Prophet of Islam. The Hellenic spirit and the Hebraic spirit are oil and water. We do not know how to mingle them. We can not perform the miracle. The alkahest is missing. THE POEM OF DUMAS In rummaging among writers on Russia the other day I came upon a forgotten article by Dumas the Elder, whose native charm and great story-telling power have made critics forget his scholarly traits and his usually sure and reliable information. As long ago as the Eighteen-fifties Dumas _père_ was telling mentally receptive France of Russian writers which America would begin to think about an half century later. This article contained a poem by Dumas, who is not known as writer of verse. Dumas journeyed across Crimea, the Caucasus. Dumas was a diligent world-explorer long before days of steam and Pullmans. He went to Baku, on his homeward way from Russia, where oil had already been discovered. He visited Derbend, too, historic city of the iron gates, so fateful strategetically, for the East and the West. Baku and Derbend have always been points of dispute between Russia, Persia, and the Caucasus. Baku was taken over by Catherine the Great just before she died. It was one of her last acts of diplomatic plundering. It was a small place then, and insignificant. It was merely a Tartar _aul_ of a few hundred houses.