of a sailor with a red rag bound around its temples, and crimson blood dripping from its grizzled hair. The lips moved and sighed "A-ah!my go-old!" Phosphorescence flashed on the waves; with a rush the ship was torn from her moorings and plunged towards the beach. Above the tumult the voice mocked and laughed, "A-a-ha, my go-0old!" I lost consciousness.

When I awoke I still lay on the prow, but it was on the prow of a wreck, festooned with sea-weed, and half buried in the sand. Gone were the sails, the crew, the old skipper, the treasure. I had dreamed.

Out across the sunset-forsaken bay I saw the man rowing towards the wreck where I lay. He was now close at hand, and I could see that he was old, with white hair and beard, and shoulder bent. He pulled up to the shore. Together the old man and I drew the boat up on the beach, and as he sat resting on the gunwale, I told him about my dream. From time to time as I recited the tale he started, as if afraid, looking behind him and shifting his legs uneasily.

Finally he laid his hand heavily on my shoulder. "Young un," said he, "young un-"

I looked up, without speaking.

"Dreamin''s a bad business, young un, dreamin'

I shrugged my shoulders amusedly. The captain seemed unduly serious.

"Yeou warn't there," he said finally, slowly and mopping his brow. "But blast me-your-Captain Trap, he's old, an' matey, he got kilt in the wrack an' Tom he swore 't he'd nary ever stay in a country as had ghosts, an' the treasure-”

I leaped to my feet.

"Yeou dreamt 'er jes' 's she happened, young un," he muttered, "esactly as she happened."

Edward Gilman Curtis.

TO ZEUS.

Written in the Vale of Tempe.

Ah, no, thou art not dead. The dimming years
Have cast no shadow on thy tranquil brow,
Although perchance our eyes are blinded now
By swirling dust of sophist doubts and fears.
Yet here to me thy form serene appears
Majestic as of old, when on the prow
Of chafing Argo Jason made his vow

To thee, amid the Greeks' resounding cheers.

There stands thy dais with its mantle white,
These plane trees are thy flowing garment's hem,
And thou art here. The creature of a day

Looks and believes. Time's veil before his sight
Sweeps back; he sees thy robe, thy diadem,
And feels that thou hast never passed away.

Charles Wharton Stork.

THE DÆMON OF POETRY.

I stood tiptoe upon a little hill.

There is an instant here and there in the poems of some visionary man where you are lost in the intensity of his exquisite egotism, where your sympathy obliterates your self. His mood becomes your mood: his passing fancy is an absolute law to your mind. That instant suspends the value of altruism.

But the mo

You have not time to understand, you merely see. ment, like a dream, sets you upon a high tower that overlooks the valleys of your life. You see the sunlight far down among the flowers, the flashing water underneath the trees, you hear the quiet, lingering music of hidden thrushes, the long, peaceful whirring of the distant surf. You see yourself an elemental thing, very free and tranquil and pure; and as you look up to the glistening mountains, covered with snow and mist, among which the gods lie sleeping, you cry out: "I also am one of you, and I am coming!" But presently the sunlight no longer lies upon the flowers, the hidden thrushes take wing to their nests, the distant surf seems to you to have the same sound over and over and over: and do you come?

I remember once when the rain was falling, towards evening, in December, I looked out upon what seemed a world of discords. Just then a church emptied into the street-men and women who walked briskly, with satisfaction in their faces, and a procession of nuns, whose whole life is one episode. It was a revelation to me that things actually could move and live on such a day: and suddenly it flashed across me that the sun was throwing long shadows across some beautiful garden in the South. It was as if I had cabled about the world at midnight, "There is no sun any longer," and that my words were read the same moment at high noon in Peking. And then I saw the flowers

all about me, and heard the music among the trees, and looked up at the distant mountains where the gods lie sleeping. This was a symbol of what poems are.

I say that the genius of poetry submerges the individual mood in the mood of some magical visionary man. It is only when the veil has dropped again, when "the dread voice is past," that you recall, as you recall in waking dreams, that you have stood face to face with Something, and wrestled with it till the breaking of day. So also the poet's mood is merged in that moment with some portion of ultimate beauty. In the Ode to a Nightingale, Keats is able to see ultimate beauty in this "light-winged Dryad of the trees," because it is fortunate and simple and free. And this very conception brings his own jarring, and, to this extent, ignoble life under subjection to something inferior to his own being, but temporarily made to seem superior by its perfect harmony with the rest of nature. There is something ignoble in being capable of ignoble experiences,-"except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." Call it what you will, the despairing desire for return to a mode of life that seems more akin to nature than our own; the Magdalen of a thousand motives and temptations anointing the feet of an infinitely simple and transparent Jesus; the cry of a Keats to some being untrammelled in its purity by "the weariness, the fever, and the fret" from which there is no escape to creatures less fortunately the slaves of subtlety. Continually more intense grows the submersion of his own mood in this glimpse of ultimate beauty, until suddenly the bird's voice turns the keen blade of ecstasy, this exquisite voice,

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

And then the veil has dropped again:

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self.

These flashing intimations, these quick mergings of the physical being with some more psychical essence, may have seemed to the ancient Greeks the unveiling of the individual genius or dæmon: the dæmon that shadows every man, as a kind of ideal self, albus et ater, black and white, to signify its sympathy with the favor and reverse of fortune that part of every man to which death is only a trivial accident. Deathless and tranquil itself, as the gods are deathless and tranquil, the soul and shadow of its ephemeral incarnation, it has borne since time began the experience of all triumphs and of all temptations. Thus able to forecast the outcome of human dealings, it is able also to hover perpetually about the clogged, unseeing homunculus whose guardian it is, and is permitted now and then to reveal its ideal perfection, as the measure to which its protegé may attain,—as an object of comparison, itself being the personal ideal and holding within itself the attainment of personal possibilities. About this psychic universe, full of strange, essential things, the dæmons of men have unrestrained and infinite range, bearing to their momentary terrestrial images somewhat that relation of perfection to imperfection which the Hermes of Praxiteles bears to the physical forms of common men. But with this difference, that physical form is a matter of fact, psychical form a matter of relativity, physical form incorrigible, psychical form corrigible. "No man by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature": any man by taking thought can add perfection to his soul.

You see about you continually in the streets common things and common people, desolate brick houses, hard, broken pavements. You do not hear the quiet song of thrushes, but only raucous street-cries and the grating sounds of traffic. These are the signs of imperfection in yourself to be unable to see the harmony in these apparent discords, for harmony there is when you have the right perspective. A little distance, a little elevation, and the common people, the common things, the brick houses form part of a landscape, a beautiful and harmonious whole. Just so, in the midst of them, the mind creates its own perspective; you see the laws of the whole, rather than the instances of the