* * * * * But now ’tis not thine to bestow, to abide, or be known in thy place; Withdraweth the voice into silence, dissolveth the form and the face. Death—Life thou discernest! Enlarged as thou art, thy ground thou must shift! Love over-liveth. Throb thou forth quickly. Heart, be uplift! The hard-won philosophy of nearly all lives is summed up in these stanzas, pregnant therefore with suggestion to those who have the untrodden way before them, and full of uplift to those who have the course behind them, and view it in retrospect as but “a stuff to try the soul’s strength on.” Not only in this poem, but throughout her work, the evolution of Miss Thomas’ philosophy of life is marked, had one time to trace its growing significance. She has sounded many stops, touched many keys of feeling and thought, so that one may do no more in a brief comment than suggest the various phases of her widely inclusive song. IX MADISON CAWEIN IN nothing, more than in his attitude toward nature, does the modern betray himself. Ours is the questioning age, the truth-seeking, the scientific age; when, for illustration, Maeterlinck laid his philosophy by to observe with infinite pains the habits of the bee and to record, without the intrusion of too many deductions, the amazing facts as nature passed them in review before his eyes,—he became the naturalist-philosopher, selling days, not for speculations, but for laws. To the poet also has come the desire which came to the philosopher to demonstrate the truth within the beauty; to penetrate to the finer law at the heart of things; in short, there has arisen what one may term the poet-naturalist, and in the recent work of Mr. Madison Cawein we have perhaps the most characteristic illustration among our own poets of the younger school, of this phase of nature-interpretation. Before considering it, however, one must trace briefly Mr. Cawein’s evolutionary steps through the haunted ways of nature in its imaginative and romantic phases, which enthralled him first, by no means wholly, but predominantly, and of which he has left many records in his volume, _Myth and Romance_. Of the more artistic poems, worthy to be put in comparison with his later work, there are several from the opening group of the collection, as these picturesque lines containing the query: What wood-god, on this water’s mossy curb, Lost in reflection of earth’s loveliness, Did I, just now, unconsciously disturb? I, who haphazard, wandering at a guess, Came on this spot, wherein, with gold and flame Of buds and blooms, the season writes its name.— Ah me! could I have seen him ere alarm Of my approach aroused him from his calm! As he, part Hamadryad and, mayhap, Part Faun, lay here; who left the shadow warm As wild-wood rose, and filled the air with balm Of his sweet breath as with ethereal sap.