Oh ye who tread the Narrow Way By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day, Be gentle when the heathen pray To Buddha at Kamàkura. he chanted over and over again like a prayer, as if those hushed and holy mountains on which we looked were Buddha, Buddha at Kamàkura. And then-- To him the Way, the Law, Apart Whom Maya held beneath her heart, Ananda’s Lord--the Bodhisat. For whoso will, from Pride released Contemning neither man nor beast, May hear the Soul of all the East About him at Kamàkura. Yea, voice of every Soul that clung To Life that strove from rung to rung, When Devadatta’s rule was young, The warm wind brings Kamàkura. My eyes had no doubt often passed over these lines without realising their beauty. The printing of a poem is only a guide, a clue to what the poem really is. It is not the poem itself. You have to divine the inner mystery and beauty. The man who can read a poem may help you to divine it for yourself. And this Lindsay did, making this poem live as we walked about--about and about. The beauty of the poem almost depends on pronouncing the word Kamàkura aright. Because we both loved this song we thought of naming some snowy mountain after Buddha, with the great plea--“Be gentle!” Be gentle, all of us! Another poem which became a possession of the heart was that of Sydney Lanier, little-known in England-- As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod, Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God. I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies, In the freedom that fills all space ’twixt the marsh and the skies By so many roots as the marsh-hen sends to the sod, I will heartily lay me ahold of the greatness of God. Like the greatness of God is the greatness within The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn. This poet of southern Georgia gave, I thought, voice to a part of America, and it was a part I had tramped in too, a land of moss-hung forests and marshes, of marsh-blossoms and many birds. In that beautiful first verse how the word “secretly” in the first line enchants the ear, and then the wonderful effect of the phrase “greatness of God” when taken with wing-flight of birds rising o’er the reeds! Talking of the modern poets, we agreed that a poem was little if there was not sound in it--melody--resonance. We found a common fellowship in Poe, and my companion rolled forth under a low and threatening heaven the cadences of “Ulalume,” his favourite poem, he averred. Browning meant nothing to him, but he was fond of some of the early poems of Tennyson, especially of “Maud,” which greatly inspired him. Curiously enough, the latter poems of Tennyson were unknown to him-- On a midnight in mid-winter when all but the winds were dead, “The meek shall inherit the earth” was a Scripture which ran through his head, and the kindred poems among the last pages of the collected works of Tennyson.