A Pittsburgh musician whose fame as a composer is widely established confessed to me recently that he had been for years trying to catch the spirit of the Steel City with a view of representing it in music, but up to the present time had failed to grasp anything tangible enough for expression. This failure on his part, however, and on the part of all musicians, by no means proves the absence of a very real _genius loci_. Pittsburgh has a very vivid personality. Mr. John Alexander succeeded in holding the elusive spirit captive long enough to put her image on canvas in his remarkable friezes in the Carnegie Library, portraying the ranks of labor, and now in this volume of verse I offer to the people at large the songs I have found in the various moods of the smoke. “Songs for the Brothers Who Toil” have come in moments spent watching the giant stacks along the river fronts breathe forth their mighty energy; “Songs for the Evening Hour” were born when the breeze from the hills lifted and shifted the smoke, bringing lyric reveries of voices from the silent battlefield, and embers from the burning town; and following the changing tides of years, “Songs for the Seasons” have come. The background and inspiration of most of these songs is industrial Pittsburgh; industrial Pittsburgh, however, is essentially American in the broadest sense. Some of the lyrics are addressed to the laborer, others to the dreamer and scholar; some to the mother and child, but all of them to that noble army made up of those who are everywhere striving to bring a measure of idealism into what is of necessity sordid and unlovely. MADELEINE SWEENY MILLER. INTRODUCTION THE TREND OF CURRENT POETRY Among earnest social workers poetry is gaining a recognition that few anticipated. The reformer of the past was an orator who preferred the longer sentences of the pulpit to the concise expression of the poet. Oratory is in the mouth of the speaker; rimes in the heart of the singer. The one must be constantly repeated to be effective; the other, living in its own right, soon gets beyond the control of its maker, and creates a perpetual harvest wherever it is blown. This revival of poetry has been encouraged by The Survey, which recently printed a collection of social hymns. The same tendency is everywhere visible, and means a return to older modes of emotional expression combined with intense modern feelings.