ifferently treated, the theme is the same as that of the "Ascrean"
which appears in the latter part of _Life Immovable_ and which may be
considered as a prelude to _The Twelve Words of the Gypsy_. There is a
flood of feeling and a cosmic imagery throughout, but they only form the
gorgeous palace within which Thought dwells in full magnificence and
mystic dimness. "As the thread of my song," says the poet in his
preface, "unrolled itself, I saw that my heart was full of mind, that
its pulses were of thought, that my feeling had something musical and
difficult to measure, and that I accepted the rapture of contemplation
just as a lad accepts his sweetheart's kiss. And then I saw that I am
the poet, surely a poet among many--a mere soldier of the verse, but
always the poet who desires to close within his verse the longings and
questions of the universal man and the cares and fanaticism of the
citizen. I may not be a worthy citizen. _But it cannot be that I am the
poet of myself alone; I am the poet of my age and of my race; and what I
hold within me cannot be divided from the world without._"

WASHINGTON, D.C.
July 5, 1919.

LIFE IMMOVABLE

FIRST PART

_In Palamas, we have found every trait of the Greek character:
He is religious and superstitious; a skeptic, a pagan, and a
pantheist.... He is a poet and a philosopher.... He abandons
himself to every impulse of the Greek soul. But he is always
fond of drawing back, of concentrating, of trying to encompass
in a general form the sensations and ideas which sway him. His
principal and latent care is to analyze himself and his world.
A poet and a thinker, Palamas does not attract the multitudes....
With him everything is a mingling of lights and shadows.... But
through his work Greece of today is most clearly set forth._

TIGRANE YERGATE, "Le Mouvement litteraire grec; La Poesie."
_La Revue_, June, 1903, vol. xlv, p. 717 f.

With _Life Immovable_, the poetic genius of Kostes Palamas reaches its
full strength. The poet, who, from his very first work, _The Songs of my
Country_, had shown his power in selecting his sources of inspiration
and in weaving the essence of purely national airs into his "light
sketches of sea and olive groves and the various sunlit aspects of Greek
life,"[3] continues to broaden his vision and art through an
unquenchable eagerness for knowledge, for an understanding of things
bea