My brothers and sisters

Of the forest

Where Time found me

Lamented perhaps

That I was broken
And sent to drift

On the unreturning waves
Of the unreturning river.
They have gone perhaps—
My brothers and sisters-
Into the building of ships
Or the building of homes. .
But it was my destiny
To drift, to burn.

Akin, but more beautiful
With secrets and colors

That the stars and the sun
Have yet to learn.

And there is a gladness in me
That is like the gladness

Of dancers and birds,

For Eternity vexes me not
With the glories and duties
Perpetual

She has given

To the stars and the sun,

The lightning, the wind.

It was my destiny

To burn,

To be a light, a warmth, a signal

Here on your shore

By the Great River

That brought me down

And nursed me on her breast,

And whispered her secrets to me,
And gave me her colors,

And flung me to my fate.

Can you behold me

Burning

O strangers,

Without wonder, without dreaming?

Zoë Akins

COMMENT

THE GREAT RENEWAL

Natura

F all the so-called civilized peoples, at least in the Occi

dent, Americans have been credited with the greatest love of wild nature. The people of "these states" instinctively take to the woods for a holiday-the woods or the waters or the mountains-to a greater degree than any Europeans; or, it has been averred, than any Central or Southern Americans. Our ancestors, coming here from crowded Europe, gradually discovered the wilderness and became infected with its lure. The magnificence of Nature in our ever-growing West-its infinite variety of beauty and grandeur-was a perpetual invitation to the pioneer. And now that those days have well-nigh passed, the children of pioneers feel the same call, and obey it as they can by camping and mountaineering under primitive conditions, and by setting aside vast areas of wild scenery as people's play grounds for all time to come.

Nothing could be wiser-it is almost a platitude to repeat that Mother Earth is the great renewer of the race, both physically and spiritually. But it would be well if we were to search the platitude more deeply, and realize that she is also the great renewer of the arts, and that it is to her, rather than to schools and precedents of the past, that our artists, our poets, should go for their deep draughts of the nectar of the gods. Since men began to build houses and gather together in villages and towns, they have been too

prone to accept roofs and walls as a normal condition of human existence, and to confine their interests more and more to the small efforts and small talk incident to small and confined areas. Thus artistic traditions which began generously, with a free out-of-door range, become narrowed down as the generations pass, become fixed in the walls and roofs of precedent and law, acquiring a definiteness and sanctity to which they are not entitled. The arts, like groups and races of men, inherit too much from the super-civilized past; even more than super-civilized human beings do they need the great renewal from Mother Earth who bore them.

In this country we have been, on the whole, too content with those walls and roofs of precedent built by the arts of the past. Yet in spite of this handicap our best work in the various arts rides free more or less, and carries a message from the wilderness. We hear a hint of it in the finest poems of Emerson and Bryant, Whittier and Longfellow. We detect a sentimentalized version of it in the landscapes of the Hudson River School and in the out-ofdoor yearnings of colonial houses. We feel its freedom more strongly in the simple porch-winged villas, and in certain frankly expressive sky-scrapers, which are developing architectural style without much aid from historic design. It became a dominant motive in such painters of land and sea as Winslow Homer, Inness, Wyant and Martin; and some of their successors are carrying on the proud tradition. Cooper of course handed it over in chunks; in Hawthorne it was a longing and an agony; and Thoreau subdued it to