information concerning the American University Union, in Europe. This hostelry, the Royal Palace Hotel, on the Place du Théâtre Français, in Paris, is a kind of university club. The location is at the head of the Avenue de l'Opéra, near the Louvre and the Tuileries Gardens. The Union is run by certain friends of American higher education, the University of California being a contributor, as is also the University Club of San Francisco. "The general object of the Union shall be to meet the needs of American university and college men and their friends who are in Europe for military or other service in the cause of the allies."

THE PROPHETIC SONGS OF SWINBURNE

J. LOEWENBERG

Vast and complex as the war is, the feelings it engenders in us are relatively simple and elemental. They fall into three groups: we hate the ruthless enemy; we admire our devoted allies; we believe in the justice and in the triumph of our cause. These are our dominant emotions. We pine for the genius who will give them permanent expression, who will voice them with passion, with sincerity, with dignity.

And only a very great genius can voice them adequately. Will he come? Who knows! He may yet arise who will embody in musical verse our loves and our hates, our sorrows and our fears, our hopes and our faiths. They are deep and they are passionate. And we would leave them, in idealized form, purged of dross, to our children as a spiritual heritage.

Meanwhile we must look to the poets now dead for the exalted expression of our thoughts and feelings. True, the poets of the past can never be our spokesmen. They could not have felt what now we feel. Never was civilization in such peril. Never was it so basely betrayed. Never have men fought for such a great cause: to save the whole world from moral ruin. Yet one poet there is in whose verse we may find the thoughts and the feelings and the passions which now are ours. This poet is Swinburne, and the poems to which we refer are his Songs before Sunrise.

These songs are prophecies, marvelously appropriate to our present crisis. Abstracted from their specific background, literary and historical, the investigation of which we leave to the scholiast-they read as if written for us. Swinburne's passionate love for the republican cause, is it not in essence our own intense devotion to the democratic ideal? His vision of a "Serene republic of a world made white," what is it but our own to "make the world safe for democracy"? And his fierce hatred for kings and princes is not more fierce than ours. We are engaged in mortal combat with autocracy itself. Our foes are the "masters" of Germany:

These princelings with gauze winglets
That buzz in the air unfurled,

These summer-swarming kinglets

These thin worms crowned and curled,

That bask and blink and warm themselves about the world.

A

Peace with "princelings," with "ghost-like gods of gold," with "empire and with treason, we can have none. "king's pledge" is a "scrap of paper.'

The speech that was half way spoken
Breaks, as a pledge that is broken,
As a king's pledge, leaving in token
Grief only for high hopes blinded,
New grief grafted on old.

In President Wilson's language: "This intolerable thing of which the masters of Germany have shown us the ugly face, this menace of combined intrigue and force which we now see so clearly as the German power, a thing without conscience or honor or capacity for covenanted peace, must be crushed." "Covenanted peace" will be possible when despotic power

With all its coils crushed, all its rings uncurled,
The one most poisonous worm that soiled the world
Is wrenched from off the throat of man, and hurled
Into deep hell from empire's helpless height.

We can find in Swinburne's songs many passages which are appropriate to the deep emotions now in our hearts. What more impassioned words can voice our feelings for the Belgian people:

O kings and queens and nations miscrable,

O fools and blind, and full of sins and tears,
With these it is, with you it is not well;

Ye have one hour, but these the immortal years.
These for a pang, a breath, a pulse of pain

Have honor, while that honor on earth shall be.

And Belgium's woe, is it not here most accurately depicted?

Ah, but would that men,

With eyelids purged by tears,

Saw, and heard again

With consecrated ears,

All the clamor, all the splendor, all the slain,

All the lights and sounds of war, the fates and fears;

Saw far off aspire,

With crash of mine and gate,

From a single pyre

The myriad flames of fate,

Soul by soul transfigured in funereal fire,

Hate made weak by love, and love made strong by hate;
Children without speech,

And many a nursing breast;

Old men in the breach,

Where death sat down a guest;

With triumphant lamentation made for each,
Let the world salute their ruin and their rest.

In one iron hour

The crescent flared and waned,

As from tower to tower,

Fire-scathed and sanguine-stained,

Death, with flame in hand, an open blood-red flower,
Passed, and where it bloomed no bloom of life remained.

The martyrdom of Belgium-what a theme for a Swinburne! And in a new "Litany of Nations" how passionately she would intercede:

By the cry of men, the bitter cry of poor men
That faint for bread;

By the blood-sweat of the people in the garden
Inwalled of kings;

By his passion interceding for their pardon
Who do these things;

By the sightless souls and fleshless limbs that labor
For not their fruit;

By the foodless mouth with foodless heart for neighbor,
That, mad, is mute.

But to her whose "bloom of life" was crushed "in one iron hour" let us say:

Lo, this one, is not it ours,

Now the ruins of dead things rattle
As dead men's bones in the pit,
Now the kings wax lean as they sit
Girt round with memories of powers,
With musters counted as cattle

And armies folded as sheep

Till the red blind husbandmen battle

Put in the sickles and reap?

Now the kings wax lean as they sit,
The people grow strong to stand;
The men they trod on and spat,
The dumb dread people that sat
As corpses cast in a pit,

Rise up with God at their hand,
And thrones are hurled on a heap,
And strong men, sons of the land,
Put in the sickles and reap.

The dumb dread people that sat

All night without screen for the night,
All day without food for the day,

They shall give not their harvest away,
They shall eat of its fruit and wax fat:
They shall see the desire of their sight,
Though the ways of the seasons be steep,
They shall climb with face to the light,
Put in the sickles and reap.