of his favourite
denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the
gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a
clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance this,
just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany:

This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth
Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ...
As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him,
Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth,
Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb--
Who frowned above him, proud and grim,
While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore
Of fire and steel and stone and war:
She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth

Of spirit, honour and clean mirth ...
His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur.

Tip from the wild red Welter of the past
Foaming he comes: let this rush, be his last.

Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest.
We have been slow as doom. Our dead
Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed--
We have denied each pleading ghost--
We have been slow: God, make us sure.
We have been slow. Grant we endure
Unto the uttermost, the uttermost.

Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord?
Then weld our diverse millions, Lord,
Into one single swinging sword.

I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is
disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this
sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives
of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance about the
press:

Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be
disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has
swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up
again.

Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for sapping all
its author's time and calories. No writer in America has greater of
more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less time stoking that
furnace out in Port Washington, and more on your novels!

There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than
the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the
past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or
three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper
some of the