NRLF 10: IN MEMORY OP B. L. T. A LINE 0* TYPE OR TWO Hew to the Line, let the quips fall where they may. The East Window. When I am bidden to the journey through the Narrow Vale, I hope the message will come, not in the summer, but in the spring, the season of birth in death. The idea of Resurrection was man s greatest inspiration a divine inspiration, if you wish. The idea has never lost its freshness, though the phrases we use to describe it are worn to threads. As we stt in the darkened room, and the preacher reads the service for the dead, we feel the triteness of the phrases and listen with a casual ear; but the idea of Resurrection takes entire pos session of our thoughts, to which the preacher s words are but a droning accompaniment. SUNDOWN. When my sun of life is low, f When the dewy shadows creep. Say for me before I go, 41 Now I lay me down to sleep." I am* at the journey s end, I have sown and I must reap; There are no more ways to mend Now I lay me down to sleep. Nothing more to doubt or dare, Nothing more to give or keep ; Say for me the children s prayer, " Now I lay me down to sleep." Who has learned along the way I Primrose path or stony steep More of wisdom than to say, " Now I lay me down to sleep "? What have you more wise to tell When the shadows round me creep? . . . All Is over, all is well ... , , Now I lay me down to sleep. [The Last Line of All.] You know the infallible sign of spring: father on the back porch, cleaning last fall s mud from his golf shoes. B. L. T. IN MEMORY OF BERT LESTON TAYLOR (B. L. T.) PROGRAM AND RECORDS OF A PUBLIC MEETING HELD IN THE BLACKSTONE THEATRE MARCH 27 1921 CHICAGO WALTER M. HILL 1922 COPYRIGHT, 1921 BY THE CLIFF DWELLERS THE TORCH PRESS CEDAR RAPIDS IOWA A, Helton SDaplor HUMORIST : SATIRIST : JOURNALIST PARAGRAPHER : POET MAN OF LETTERS AND OF LAUGHTER EDITOR FOR FOURTEEN YEARS . OF THE "LINE O TYPE OR TWO" COLUMN IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE AUTHOR OF THE WELL IN THE WOOD THE CHARLATANS A LINE O VERSE O^ TWO THE PIPE-SMOKE CARRY MOTLEY MEASURES 13, 1866 jfWarcfj 19, 1921 469900 MEETING IN MEMOEY OF BEET LESTON TAYLOE THE BLACKSTONE THEATRE, CHICAGO, MARCH 27, 1921 Under the auspices of The Cliff Dwellers and The Chicago Tribune KARLETON HACKETT, PRESIDING C MINOE QUARTET, romanza and allegretto BRAHMS THE FLONZALEY QUARTET B. L. T. : THE MAN KARLETON HACKETT VERSES TO B. L. T FRANKLIN P. ADAMS Reading by DONALD ROBERTSON B. L. T. IN JOURNALISM JOSEPH MEDILL PATTERSON B. L. T. AS MAN OF LETTERS. .HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER B. L. T. S WORK AND GENIUS HORACE J. BRIDGES POEMS BY B. L. T DONALD ROBERTSON The Road to Anywhere. Canopus. Battle Song. Invocation. COMMITTEE ON MEMORIAL ARRANGEMENTS: Henry Kitchell Webster, Guy Hardy, Charles Collins, Arthur Bissell, Ashton Stevens, Karleton Hackett, Payson S. Wild, Karl Edwin Harriman, Tiffany Blake, Clifford S. Raymond. USHERS : Arthur Bissell, Murry Nelson, Andrew N. Rebori, Henri C. E. David, Thomas E. Tallmadge, Allen Spencer, Wallace Rice, Frederick J. Wessels, Payson S. Wild, R. R. Jarvie, L. C. Woodworth. B. L. T.: THE MAN By KARLETON HACKETT When the Flonzaley Quartet gave their last concert in this theatre a few weeks ago they played Brahms C Minor Quartet, which con tains the romanza and allegretto to which we have just listened ; and Bert Taylor was in his seat, as he always was for the concerts of the Flonzaley Quartet, bathing his soul in the ineffable beauty of the music, even as have we today. Music was to him an essential element. He lived under an intense nervous strain, his whole heart bound up in the "Line" which was never absent from his thoughts day or night; and as he gave of himself without stint so he constantly had recourse to the re storative powers of music as necessary to his well-being. He was a tonic. When he drew his chair up to the luncheon table you could feel a bracing of the fibres all about, our slack speech drew taut, the man with the platitude 7 on the tip of his tongue swallowed hard and gazed out of the window, and there was talk, a play of wit upon wit ; at times there was a flash; out came Bert s little book; he would make a pencil jotting; and we knew that some one had "made the line." His mind was as alembic in which banal ities, " flubdub," dissolved, and yet so sim ply, so inevitably, that there was no sediment of bitterness left behind, but what there was of truth or of wit came forth purged to be capped by him with an all-illuminating head. He loved words, but not as a purist, for cant as to words was as foreign to his nature as cant in any other form ; but the melody of the beautiful line, the vigor of accurate ex pression, the apt usage, the happy turn of a phrase and even the mere sound of the word. For years he was fascinated with the name Saskatchewan. He used to speak it aloud that others might sense its charm. He knew the region well, and planned many long trips there since he was convinced that any land which had gained for itself such a name must be of wondrous charm. His eyes were ever turning towards the north, to the cool silences of the woods, for there was in his nature a something shy, 8 aloof, that found itself most at home out in the open, under the great pines. It was the forest primeval that he loved-, to wrestle with it in all its moods, with pack on back twenty-five miles a day along the Indian trails, over the lakes, across the carries, down the streams, and then at night bed himself on balsam boughs and breathe in their balm. There his spirit expanded and he opened his heart, revealing the man within, as was not possible for him amid bricks and mortar. Thence he returned, revived and invigorated to grapple with the great riddle, and in his fight for right to enshrine himself in our hearts. Something that was Bert Taylor has be come a part of the best that there is in all of us. VERSES TO B. L. T. Friend, through a blurring mist of tears That with the days but faster flow, Contribute I, as twenty years Ago; When with your gentle hand you showed A faltering, but adoring youth The road the straight and shining road Of Truth. With you ahead as loving guide To light the road for me, you know And only you how I have tried Togo. Dark now the way ; the road unfair, Where now the guide from whom to learn The Path? . . . O Friend, I don t know where To turn! And yet you left the path so true That not the blindest cannot trace His kinship to the so-called hu- Man race. 10 Sweet friend, to whom I have revealed The heart within me through the years, You know how poorly I ve concealed My tears. Light is my threnody and crude ; I might have made it heavier, were it Not that I knew this is how you d Prefer it. FRANKLIN P. ADAMS 11 B. L. T. IN JOURNALISM By JOSEPH MEDILL PATTERSON I was asked to speak briefly on B. L. T. as a newspaper man. There are a number of his other co-workers who are better fitted to speak on this subject than I am because they knew him more intimately than I did. In other words, there were the " gentlemen at the adjacent desks " to whom he talked so often people who were with him more than I was, any one of whom could have been chosen for this, and who would be better qualified to do it than I. The manager of a newspaper is something like a trouble squad that is, his attention goes to the place where inefficiency, failure and trouble are found. Where everything is going all right, that is one of the places he never visits. He spends much of his time in departments where things are not going as they should, and that is one of the reasons why I did not know Mr. Taylor better sim- 12 ply because there was never any trouble in his department. Some geniuses, newspaper geniuses as w^ell as others, are temperamental. They are frequently disturbed, perhaps by a hap pening in a distant city, and they call up to say that they cannot report for work on this day or that. That was not true of Mr. Taylor. The possibility that his column would not be prepared never entered into our calculations. I do not recall the contracts that were made with him from time to time. I don t remember, but I don t think it was stipulated that he should have absolute independence of expression, but whether it was stipulated or not, he did have it. He took it, and what ever effort was made to restrain him was made at the beginning of our association, so that he was, you might say, a newspaper within a newspaper. He had the swing of the space, and he filled it as he wanted. We have to judge of his efficiency from that. His column was one column long, and it was supposed to be written up to standard every day, and it was so written every day. I have spoken of making contracts with him. I am talking about those things of 13 which I happen to know something. I wasn t an intimate friend of his. He knew he was good ; that his value was high ; and he placed a high value on his services. He was the most businesslike person to deal with I have ever known. I mean to say this, that if he had gone into the business of buying or selling any commodity, I feel sure that he would have been very successful, for his mind was accurate and quick. And his word: As has often been said, his word was as good as his bond. In his case it was better than anybody s bond could be. If a question like a contract came up you would talk with him for three minutes; he would tell you what his terms would be ; and he would say, "I will take it" or " I will not take it. That is all there was to it, and you might wait for three months until the thing w r as written up. I am not talking about the way he wrote because you who read it know as much as I do about it. All I knew about what he wrote was when it was in print. I never read it before that. These are some of the experiences I had with him, and such as I can tell you. As a newspaper man he was peculiarly expert be- 14 cause he was a printer as well as a writer. His early life was spent on several small town newspapers, where he learned to set type, and thus he learned the typographical effect of certain printing, and was aware of its value. He knew when to put something in italics, and he knew when to use the smaller or the larger type. There is a real art about it, and he knew how to bring out the more pungent paragraphs, surrounding them with two sets of different type to give the different meanings, and he did this. He was an informed spirit, and he was a leader. I will say this in closing : I think at the time of his death he was the greatest newspaper man in America. I think that is what he was the best all-round journalist we had in this country at the time he died. 15 B. L. T. AS MAN OF LETTERS By HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER Bert Leston Taylor was, among men of letters the first, I think, of a new species. He was not, though he w r rote many essays, an essayist. He was not, primarily, a poet, although his two volumes of verse, if there were nothing else, would entitle him to rank as one, and a good one. He was a columnist. And the column is, it seems to me, a new art form, holding no lineal relation to the pro ducts of the epigrammatists and occasional versifiers of times past. For the column as Taylor achieved it was no arithmetical sum of its component parts. It was an organized thing. It had form much as the sonata has form, and like the sonata form it was capable in his skilful hands of almost infinite varia tion. This was, perhaps, why time could not wither it, nor custom stale. I doubt very much whether the amazing technical skill and the loving labor which he so lavishly devoted to it are generally 16 appreciated. And, indeed, it is a compli ment to his art that they should not be. We took it year after year as a sort of natural phenomenon, as a blessed thing that was somehow always there, fair weather or foul, to begin the day with a pinch of Attic salt from an inexhaustible supply to flavor the varying moods in which we came to the breakfast table. We are bewildered now that it is gone. It is as if the spring were not come back this year. This is not the time to attempt a technical analysis of the column, but it may be noted that one of the elements of it was its mere appeal to the eye. B. L. T. was an expert typographer and the column was, in the technical sense of the word, composed with the utmost concern. His uncanny genius for writing captions to the work of his contribs has been, of course, our wonder and our despair. But there is a mystery about the column deeper than this, and perhaps less widely noted. Every column, whether it contained of his actual writing only the three per cent he sometimes playfully avowed or a great deal more, became, by some miracle of transub- stantiation, himself. It had many brilliant 17 contributors whose initials or pen-names we learned to look for Pan, Pontif ex, P. D. S., Riquarius but the column, the whole col umn, from its ornamental heading to its justly celebrated last line, was B. L. T. The grain and texture of his mind and spirit im penetrated every line of it. It figured forth with such perfection of line and color, high light and shadow, the personality of the man who created it, that the half million of his readers who never saw him nor heard him speak knew him almost as well as the hand ful of cronies who sat at table with him three or four times every week. I am finding it hard to confine myself to my subject, Taylor as a man of letters, for his art was not, to him, an old coat which he put on when he sat down at his desk. It was to an extraordinary degree, the man himself. The beginning of his art was a fastidious sensitiveness to words. They lived for him ; they were as individual as his friends. He loved the bold outspoken clean-edged ones, words which could be precise without being pretentious. He was no snob about them. Many an impudent new-hatched gamin of a word that came grinning to him from the streets, the shops, the bleachers or the links, 18 he welcomed with whole-hearted joy and in troduced among the grandees of his vocabu lary. But mincing words, affected words, bastards of pedantry and ignorance, were his predestined prey. He marked them down and transfixed them with the golden shafts of his wit, as Phoebus Apollo transfixed, one by one, with his golden shafts, the sons of Poseidon. I will not say he hated them. I cannot remember that B. L. T. ever hated anything. Why should he hate that at which he could always laugh? But I think the Line might almost have gone Republican along with the rest of his newspaper had the candidate restrained his tongue from that abortive monster, normalcy. He was a connoisseur of life. He savored its humors delicately, thoughtfully. He en joyed a sense of adventure and discovery. The side of a question which everybody took, the phrase that everybody used, the play that had run fifty weeks and the novel that had sold a hundred thousand copies were all suspect a little with him. They must show cause, sustain the burden of proof. Yet he was as little precious as he was vul gar and vulgarity would have been im possible to him. He had a robust sense of 19 life and of humor. He could laugh at any thing that Rabelais could have laughed at. And this, I think, is one of the great debts we owe him. He taught us to laugh, again, without shame, over many of the rich, com mon, elemental jests which the prurient- prudish would attempt to deny out of existence. I spoke of him as beginning a new species among men of letters. Yet his spirit, among the shades of the masters of his language, will find some boon companions. Two, in particular, I would name, Thomas Gray and Edward FitzGerald. Both are catalogued in the public mind as poets, yet of Gray s poems all that live today are the Elegy in the Coun try Churchyard, Eton College, and the Cat Drowned in a Bowl of Goldfish ; and of Fitz Gerald, outside his translations of Omar Khayyam and Calderon, all that remains is the little poem about the meadows in spring, which, by internal evidence merely, he be guiled the editor of the Athenaeum into believing to be the work of Charles Lamb. Yet the position of Gray and FitzGerald as classic is utterly secure. The explanation is that they were two of the greatest and most inspired letter- writers 20 that ever lived. Both were immensely learned men. Gray was the greatest scholar of his age. Both enjoyed the friendship of the finest spirits of their respective times. Both were touched by the magic wand of irony; restrained from putting their backs into things, from getting things done which seemed but dubiously worth doing. And both found self-expression in writing letters to their friends. They put into these letters gossip, criti cism, irresponsible nonsense frequently ri bald bits of verse. Gray addressed to his college at Cambridge an ode to ignorance. FitzGerald played with a project for com piling a Gazette of Useless Information. And these volumes of letters, one nearly a hundred years old and the other well into its second century, are as fresh to the reader today as if they had come to him in his morning s mail. Well, in spirit B. L. T. was a letter-writer, too. He wrote a letter just a colum long every day. It came as personally from him, put us as much in possession of him, as if he had sent it to each of us in a sealed envelope. Whether the form in which they are written will lend itself practicably to collection and 21 publication for posterity, I don t know. In our living memory the man is imperishable. But, Thomas Gray and Edward Fitz- Gerald, I felicitate you both. For, rare souls as you are, there has joined your com pany a kindred spirit. 22 B. L. T. S WORK AND GENIUS By HORACE J. BRIDGES One is often tempted to suspect that the be setting sin natural to a large and youthful community is the error often of counf ound- ing bigness with greatness. Certainly in this hustling American life of ours we find that grave error often committed, and it is necessary at times for us to pause and re mind ourselves of the fact that the commun ity which mistakes largeness for greatness will never become great. If we want to know what this Chicago of ours really is and is capable of becoming, we should resolutely close our ears to the brag garts; to those who urge us to " boost" our community by swaggering about numbers and valuations. Never mind the money and the statistics. Forget them, and forget the growth of population, and look for the material of a true judgment about Chicago to its artists, its men of letters, its poets, 23 thinkers, creative minds and reformers; to those who are self-sacrificingly working for the good of others and the betterment of posterity; for it is by such men and their work that posterity will judge of Chicago. This is a large city. We are told it often, far too often. It is vastly larger than, say the Athens of Pericles. And yet, when one compares the Athens of Pericles with the Chicago of today and its present political leaders, one feels that perhaps the com parison might prove less favorable to Chicago if it were drawn with regard to other matters than mere size and numbers. The question of questions the question by which the future is going to judge us is whether we can produce men less unworthy to compare with Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, with Socrates and Plato, than some of our political leaders to compare with Pericles. That will be the test, mark you; that and nothing else. I venture to think that when this judg ment of posterity comes to be rendered it will run somewhat to the effect that in our first century, under difficulties, very great and in some cases insuperable, we haven t done so badly. And one of the clearest 24 reasons that posterity will have for deliver ing (if it does deliver) so favorable a judg ment will be the personality and the achieve ment of the man whose completed life and work we are celebrating here today. Note, if you please, that word completed. One of the mistakes we make about the thing we call death, and one of the reasons why we fall into an exaggerated grieving over it, is our habit of using the word "end," instead of the word "completion." We think of something chopped off, catastrophically in terrupted and maimed, instead of something rounded off to a fitting close. When you remember that life is great in terms only of quality, valuable only for its intrinsic excellence, you then realize that any worthy life any life that has achieved this quality of inner, essential worth is com plete at any moment, and does not depend for its fulfillment on duration. So that when I share, as I do, not only the general grief of this community, the grief of those who have lost a valued writer, thinker and humorist, but that more poignant grief of those who have lost a personal friend, a comrade they had learned to love, my mood is controlled by the thought of the completion of a fine 25 life. It is a mood not wholly of sorrow, but tempered with a certain restrained triumph. Taylor has been spoken of here this after noon as a music-lover, as a newspaper man, and as a man of letters. You have heard the judgment of those who knew and could competently estimate his rare distinction in these departments. Let us now think of him for a moment as a dispenser of sunshine. One woman in a distant town, writing in on some purely business matter, added a post-script expressing her regret on hearing of the news of his death, and asked, " What are we going to do without our daily smile?" Our daily smile! That is what Bert Taylor s work meant to people by thousands, by tens and hundreds of thousands. One cannot but recall in connection with him that lovely comment of Dr. Johnson on the death of Garrick. What could be more truly applied to our friend Bert Taylor? "I am disappointed, " said Johnson, "by that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gayety of nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure." The gayety, if not of nations at least of states and cities and wide countrysides, has been eclipsed by the pass ing of our friend. Surely, in a world so 26 troubled as this world of ours has been these last few years, and is today, it is a very great thing to have given to countless thou sands "a daily smile." Throughout those days when there was little to smile at, in times when the things we value more than life were in jeopardy in the world, Taylor was able not only to keep his soul serene above the tumult, but to impart an infectious gayety to all of us, even in the darkest hours. It was the religious yearning of George Eliot that she might- Beget the smiles that have no cruelty ; Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense. So shall we join the Choir Invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world. How literally Taylor s work and genius enabled him to fulfill this aspiration! He was, in very fact, to hundreds of thousands, the sweet presence of a good diffused, and the smiles that he begot were always devoid of cruelty. He had, as Mr. Webster has reminded us, in a high and rare degree, the gift of irony. He was eminent as a satirist. But note that he escaped what seems to be the besetting 27 danger of the satirist that of turning pessi mist and cynic. For examples of this peril of the satirist one needs look no further than to Swift and Mark Twain. (Remember the Fourth Part of " Gulliver, " and "What Is Man?" and "The Mysterious Stranger.") Taylor s humor was as considerate at the end as at the beginning, his satire as kindly, his last smile as humane as his first. He was like Elia. What higher praise could be given him than to say that he has written pages worthy of rank with Elia s? Yet this we can justly give. To laugh with men rather than at them ; to set them laughing at -themselves ; never to raise a laugh against innocence, against hon est simplicity, against any worthy quality ; to sting nothing but vice, humbug, false pre tenses, arrogant ignorance, snobbery or pre tentious philistinism this was his rule of life. To live up to such a rule, to the extent he did, through long years of incessant work, was great grace. Mr. Patterson has told us this afternoon of the fact that in the early day that is, when they did not know him the authorities of the Tribune made some tentative efforts to restrain his independence of utterance. I 28 am glad to hear that these efforts were made. I did not know that any body had ever been rash enough to attempt anything of the kind. The utter and hopeless failure of these efforts, which Mr. Patterson admits, will prove to the world what never needed prov ing to Taylor s friends that there was in him a certain high quality that nowadays is all too rare. I mean that absolute, un qualified, unpurchasable self-respect and in dependence that made him care less for any thing in the world than he cared for the in tegrity of his own mind and conscience. That, friends, is why he was a great news paper man. He did not exemplify that strange coincidence, so frequently to be observed, by which the opinions of journalists are found to agree with those of the persons who employ them. We all valued him, first and foremost, because we knew that the opinions he expressed were his own. What that meant to some of us during the early years of the war, I can hardly trust myself to say. Taylor was one of those who from the beginning could see what was at stake in the conflict. In a community where it wasn t always easy to express one s self freely on that subject, and under circumstances where 29 it must sometimes have been particularly difficult, he always did it. He always said what he believed, and let others say freely what they believed. His standards were high ones. Only the best in literature, poetry, music and thought appealed to him. He had those two great qualifications that are the conditions of citizenship in the republic of letters catholicity combined with discrimination; the capacity to value a writer for what he was and could do, and a discrimination that prevented him from falling into the idolatry of sham taste, and crediting men with being what they were not, and doing what they could not. He had the inevitable exclusive- ness of all trained taste, yet without snob bery. He could laugh and enjoy with the " high-brow," yet he could laugh and enjoy with the "low-brow" without condescension. You have, of course, noticed in his column occasional references, overt or faintly veiled, to his children. In these he displayed a deli cate, yearning tenderness, affectionate with out sentimentality, showing its depth by its very restraint. I take the liberty of referr ing to this matter because he did thus put himself on record, and also because in these 30 personal utterances, these more intimate notes in what Mr. Webster has called his daily letter, he disclosed the spirit which in formed his attitude to the whole of the " so- called human race. It was a spirit of kindly regard even for people who were absurd. He recognized that there was somewhat worth while in those he criticized. This is why even the victims of his shafts could and did enjoy and praise his work. And as to his humor, who shall attempt to characterize it? And who can rival it? Who is now going to read for us the " signs of the times ? Who now will put our small towns on the map, and civilize them with laughter, as he did ? Who will develop our humor and our urbanity by making us alert to detect and to avoid the absurdities into which we are prone to fall ? There is no greater need in any com munity and especially in a young and heterogeneous community like ours than the need for an unofficial but acceptable cen sor of manners and mannerism. Socrates was called the gadfly of Athens because he made people recognize their ignorance, their pretentiousness, the absurdity of their " false conceit of wisdom. Taylor was a gadfly in 31 that sense. His sting was as painless as it was pointed. He not only set a standard, he was a living standard, to which we had to live up, below which we dared not fall. In the middle ages there flourished that important functionary, the Court Jester. Now the Court Jester when he was worthy of the job was there to protect the King from his worst enemies, his flatterers. To day Demos is King, a many-headed sover eign of uncertain mood and wavering intelli gence, surrounded, assailed, and led astray by a sickening swarm of flatterers. Those flatterers never received any mercy from Taylor. He was an effective antidote to the subtlest and most dangerous vice that afflicts our system. We have learned much in this nation and especially in that part of the country from which Taylor came of the power of the preacher. But today the press, for good or ill, has a more far-reaching and potent in fluence than any preacher can hope to have. Yet the journalist too is a preacher, and preaching is preaching even if it is done in cap and bells. So done, it is often more effective than preaching in stole and surplice. No preacher can hope for so wide a congre- 32 gation as Taylor had, and few can hope to attain, on the whole, higher standards. Taylor s thoroughness was one of the secrets of his great success. I recall a re mark of his which when he made it, I absurdly misunderstood. Some three years ago he said in his column something to the effect that the third stanza of Keats "Grec ian Urn" ode would have been much better if Keats had worked longer over it. I thought he was joking, and that he was inviting his contributors to try their hand at parodies of the stanza in question. Under this impres sion I perpetrated a parody of it, which he printed. But in a subsequent conversation he told me that his remark was serious. It is a fact that the third stanza is very inferior to the rest of that bewilderingly beautiful poem. This criticism I quote for the light it throws on Taylor. His work seldom be trayed the lack of that extra twenty minutes concentration which so often creates the greatest of all differences, the difference between the good and the excellent. What a following he had! How multi tudinous were his admirers! One of the most charming evidences of this was told me by a friend who was present at his funeral 33 the other day. There he met a man who said he was a plasterer by trade, that he had three times "made the Line, 7 and he had taken a day off and lost a day s wages to come to Taylor s funeral. I hope that man is here this afternoon. I should like to meet him. Mr. Hackett, in language as felicitous as his thought, has told us that something that was Bert Taylor has become a part of the best in us. I believe this. I believe that Mr. Hackett did not use a mere figure of speech, but spoke what is actually true. That the essential life in a man is im mortal and indestructible is evidenced by this, that his spirit goes on bearing fruit and producing effects in and through the spirits of those in whom it has quickened some de gree of a life like to its own. It is not so much what one does, but what one is (where of one s achievements are but the revealing evidence) which gleams through the flesh and through the conquered circumstances of one s life. Taylor was a many-sided man: citizen, husband, father, thinker, poet, humorist, nature-lover. And now the nature-lover is "made one with nature." "He is a pre sence to be felt and known, in darkness and 34 in light, from herb and stone. " Thus living "in lives made better by his presence" not only in individual lives, but in the collective life of his city "he is not dead ; he doth not sleep ; he has awakened from the dream of life." 35 THE ROAD TO ANYWHERE Across the places deep and dim, And places brown and bare, It reaches to the planet s rim The Road to Anywhere. Now east is east, and west is west, But north lies in between, And he is blest whose feet have prest The road that s cool and green. The road of roads for them that dare The lightest whim obey, To follow where the moose or bear Has brushed his headlong way. The secrets that these tangles house Are step by step revealed, While to the sun the grass and boughs A store of odors yield. More sweet these odors in the sun Than swim in chemist s jars ; And when the fragrant day is done, Night and a shoal of stars. 36 Oh, east is east, and west is west, But north lies full and fair; And blest is he who follows free The Koad to Anywhere. B. L. T. 37 CANOPUS When quacks with pills political would dope us, When politics absorbs the livelong day, I like to think about the star Canopus, So far, so far away. Greatest of visioned suns, they say who list ? em; To weigh it science always must despair. Its shell would hold our whole dinged solar system, Nor ever know twas there. When temporary chairmen utter speeches, And frenzied henchmen howl their battle hymns, My thoughts float out across the cosmic reaches To where Canopus swims. When men are calling names and making faces, And all the world s a jangle and ajar, I meditate on interstellar spaces And smoke a mild seegar. For after one has had about a week of The arguments of friends as well as foes, A star that has no parallax to speak of Conduces to repose. B. L. T. 39 BATTLE SONG We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord, And all we ask to stead us is a blessing on each sword; And tribes and factions mingle in one great fighting clan Who issue forth to battle behind a fighting man. We stand at Armageddon, where men have stood before, And whatso be the cost of it our voice is still for war. Now let the traitor truckle, the falterer go fawn, We only ask to follow where the battle line is drawn. We stand at Armageddon, where fighting men have stood, And creeds and races mingle in one great brotherhood ; 40 And here from dawn to darkness we battle for the Lord ; Thy blessing, great Jehovah, on each im patient sword! B. L. T. 41 INVOCATION O Comic Spirit, hovering overhead, With sage s brows and finely-tempered smile, Prom whose bowed lips a silvery laugh is sped At pedantry, stupidity, and guile, So visioned by that sage on whom you bent Always a look of perfect sympathy, Whose laugh, like yours, was never idly spent, Look, Spirit, sometimes f ellowly on me ! Instruct and guide me in the gentle art Of thoughtful laughter once satyric noise ; Vouchsafe to me, I humbly ask, some part, However little, of your perfect poise. Keep me from bitterness, contempt, and scorn, From anger, pride, impatience, and disdain. When I am self -deceived your smile shall warn, Your volleyed laughter set me right again. 42 Am I inspired to mirth or mockery, Grant, Spirit, that it be not overdrawn ; And am I moved to malice, let it be Only "the sunny malice of a faun." B. L. T. 43 The G*-iff Qhioago. G63 469900 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA UBRARY