in all that
is beautifully impractical? If I have adventured in a new world of
common things, have you not lingered in the old world of great and
impossible things? If I have shivered in the gray dawn of a new day,
have you not crouched over the dying embers of the fire of yesterday?
Ah, Dane, you cannot rekindle that fire. The whirl of the world scatters
its ashes wide and far, like volcanic dust, to make beautiful crimson
sunsets for a time and then to vanish.

None the less are you a dedicated spirit, priest that you are of a dying
faith. Your prayers are futile, your altars crumbling, and the light
flickers and drops down into night. Poetry is empty these days, empty
and worthless and dead. All the old-world epic and lyric-singing will
not put this very miserable earth of ours to rights. So long as the
singers sing of the things of yesterday, glorifying the things of
yesterday and lamenting their departure, so long will poetry be a vain
thing and without avail. The old world is dead, dead and buried along
with its heroes and Helens and knights and ladies and tournaments and
pageants. You cannot sing of the truth and wonder of to-day in terms of
yesterday. And no one will listen to your singing till you sing of
to-day in terms of to-day.

This is the day of the common man. Do you glorify the common man? This
is the day of the machine. When have you sung of the machine? The
crusades are here again, not the Crusades of Christ but the Crusades of
the Machine--have you found motive in them for your song? We are
crusading to-day, not for the remission of sins, but for the abolition
of sinning, of economic and industrial sinning. The crusade to Christ's
sepulchre was paltry compared with the splendour and might of our
crusade to-day toward manhood. There are millions of us afoot. In the
stillness of the night have you never listened to the trampling of our
feet and been caught up by the glory and the romance of it? Oh, Dane!
Dane! Our captains sit in council, our heroes take the field, our
fighting men are buckling on their harness, our martyrs have already
died, and you are blind to it, blind to it all!

We have no poets these days, and perforce we are singing with our hands.
The walking delegate is a greater singer and a finer singer than you,
Dane Kempton. The cold, analytical economist, delving in the dynamics
of society, is more the prophet than you. The carpenter at his bench,
the blacksmith by his forge, the boil