I'll fill a life's full cycle in my flight:
Though I soar into the clouds or sink to dust,
My orb will come around; I'll reach my height.

The Vocal Memnon to the Sphynx

The sands of time drift round me, and within
There is the knell of passing and decay:
The sun-smit vastness of the world doth weigh
Upon my riddling soul like hidden sin,
And bids it speak. Thou desert art my kin!
I crumble to thee, waning day by day;
But I am cursed with questions that betray
The end of life before death's hours begin,
My eyes are staring, yet their sight is blind.
My ears are hollow, yet they hear no sound.
My knees are buried and my body sinks.
The stars weave fates that they themselves unwind,
Traversing the same cycles round and round;
While I sit gazing at the silent Sphynx.

[Illustration: Louis Anspacher]

Sholom Asch: The Jewish Maupassant

_A Menorah Prize Essay_

BY PERCY B. SHOSTAC

[Illustration: _PERCY B. SHOSTAC, born in 1892, in New York City,
where he attended the Ethical Culture School and High School; graduate
of the University of Wisconsin (1915), where he was an active member
of the Wisconsin Dramatic Society and contributed frequently to the
Wisconsin Play-Book. He is now teaching English at the University of
Kansas. The present Essay was awarded the Wisconsin Menorah Prize for
1915._]

I

THE MAN AND HIS WORK

IT was in the little parlor of a four-room New York flat. The room was
furnished sparsely: a table and a few chairs of bamboo, a long row of
books on the yellow floor along one wall, some Chinese ornaments and
plants, a few Russian embroideries, a rich Persian covering on the
couch, and candles--many candles burning and flickering on their rest
of saucer or glazed clay candlestick. Our hostess seemed part of her
room; she was a Russian Jewess, decidedly Oriental in type, rare in
her beauty and still more rare in her personality and charm.

Sholom Asch sat opposite me smoking his cigarette and sipping his
coffee--a big man of thirty-five, with broad shoulders and a frame
sturdy and substantial; thick black hair, a high forehead, a
characteristically Jewish nose, a firm mouth, a little black
moustache, and deep brown eyes--eyes that at times would seem to be
unaware of anything surrounding them, yet one felt that they saw
everythin