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Kansas University Weekly.
that awakens these same mind echoes and not aim to portray, with faultless geometrical precision, the image of a particular woman. Poe was right in saying that the death of a beautiful woman is the saddest and sublimest of all poetic themes.
'When we say, her brow is a snowdrift, her neck is a swan's, her eyes are stars of heaven, her lips are roses,' does it take hold of the reader? No. Enumerate a page of such charms and the reader is still unsatisfied. The works of literature are full of such enumerations, but they make us feel ourselves behind prison bars. It is geometry, not art.
But let me read just one line from this little volume. Listen to this:
"Zuleikah! The young Agas in the bazaar are slim-waisted and wear yellow slippers.
"Does that not set you floating in the fields of fancy? Does it not have echoes? It sends you roaming in a whole world of beauty and gorgeous color. But all this color and beauty are mind echoes that respond to this simple line which does not even say that Agas are beautiful.
"Zuleikah! The young Agas in the bazaar are slim-waisted and wear yellow slippers.
"Now that word, slim-waisted, calls up echoes of grace in form and feature! It allows the fancy to supply this grace and on such occasions fancy supplies the very best in stock. Yellow slippers: only a gorgeous gown,—pale violet perhaps—only rich black hair and eyes can match yellow slippers. But these colors come from our fancy's hoard, and fancy paints with colors unknown to the retina. So from this sentence we get the highest possible beauty of form and color. We get one of those splendid, indefinitive, sublime pictures that the artist knows only in dreams.
"Zuleikah! The young Agas in the bazaar are slim-waisted and wear yellow slippers.
"What a host of suggestions go with that one line! What an explosion of echoes responds to that simple statement! It allows the ideal in us to speak. And the more we have in us, the more we get from it. There is poetry pure and simple.
"Zuleikah! The young Agas in the bazaar are slim-waisted and wear yellow slippers.
"The same words for every ear. But each of us is a harp tuned to a different pitch and different key and each of us will hear mind echoes of his own—echoes that stir us according to our depth of soul, our experience, or our love of beauty. And that is why we feel satisfied when the last echoe melts into silence." CYLEGICEL.
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The Parade.
Twen One was not very enthusiastic on political questions; but a rally was about to be held in the town where he was attending school, and as Twen expected to cast his first vote at the coming election and had often reproached himself for not having more ardor in the service of the party in whose principles he believed, he decided not only to go to see the parade but to take an even more active part in it by marching with the University Republican club of which he was a rather lukewarm member. In this way he thought that he could see the parade very well, and perhaps for once arouse in himself a little enthusiasm by going out and yelling with the rest.
On the appointed day Twen went to the place where the parade was to form, and joined the crowd of University students who were standing about waiting for the line to be drawn up.
The street was thronged with people wearing their campaign buttons and holiday faces. Twen did not wear a button. Somehow he had always felt that such a decoration was a poor means of publishing one's opinions, and would be especially unsuitable for one whose arguments on the money question were as meagre as his own. After a delay of an hour or more the beribboned marshals of the day succeeded in placing the various companies in position, and starting the procession down the main street of the town. The bands began to play; the crowds drew back from the street to the sidewalks; and the air was filled with cheers. The University club commenced giving its yell, which was a rather long one and expressed a pleasing sentiment about the weeping and wailing of the Democratic donkey. Twen opened his mouth and tried to chime in with