Thus life by life, and love by love, We passed through the cycles strange, And breath by breath, and death by death, We followed the chain of change. Till there came a time in the law of life When over the nursing sod The shadows broke, and the soul awoke In a strange, dim dream of God. I was thewed like an Auroch bull, And tusked like the great Cave Bear; And you, my sweet, from head to feet, Were gowned in your glorious hair. Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave, When the night fell o’er the plain, And the moon hung red o’er the river bed, We mumbled the bones of the slain. I flaked a flint to a cutting edge, And shaped it with brutish craft; I broke a shank from the woodland dank. And fitted it, head and haft, Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn, Where the Mammoth came to drink— Through brawn and bone I drove the stone, And slew him upon the brink. Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered our kith and kin; From west and east to the crimson feast, The clan came trooping in. O’er joint and gristle and padded hoof, We fought, and clawed and tore, And cheek by jowl, with many a growl, We talked the marvel o’er. I carved the fight on a reindeer bone, With rude and hairy hand, I pictured his fall on the cavern wall That men might understand. For we lived by blood, and the right of might, Ere human laws were drawn, And the age of sin did not begin Till our brutal tusks were gone. And that was a million years ago, In a time that no man knows; Yet here tonight in the mellow light, We sit at Delmonico’s; Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs, Your hair is dark as jet; Your years are few, your life is new, Your soul untried, and yet— Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay, And the scarp of the Purbeck flags, We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones, And deep in the Coraline crags; Our love is old, our lives are old, And death shall come amain; Should it come today, what man may say, We shall not live again? God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds And furnished them wings to fly; He sowed our spawn in the world’s dim dawn, And I know that it shall not die. Though cities have sprung above the graves Where the crook-boned men made war, And the ox-wain creaks o’er the buried caves, Where the mummied mammoths are. Then as we linger at luncheon here, O’er many a dainty dish, Let us drink anew to the time when you Were a tadpole and I was a fish. ED. NOTE: Above striking poem is reproduced at the special request of a friend. [Illustration] Bargain In Books