CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY—A WORD OF WISDOM, FOUND WRITTEN, LIKE THE MOST ANCIENT, ON LEATHER 'Ah! old men's boots don't go there, sir!' said the bootmaker to me one day, as he pointed to the toes of a pair I had just brought him for mending. It was a significant observation, I thought; and as I went on my way home, writing another such chronicle with every springing step, it filled... more...

TO BELGIUM Our tears, our songs, our laurels—what are these  To thee in thy Gethsemane of loss,Stretched in thine unimagined agonies  On Hell's last engine of the Iron Cross. For such a world as this that thou shouldst die  Is price too vast—yet, Belgium, hadst thou soldThyself, O then had fled from out the earth  Honour for ever, and left only Gold. Nor diest thou—for soon shalt... more...

ENGLISH POEMS TO THE READER Art was a palace once, things great and fair,And strong and holy, found a temple there:Now 'tis a lazar-house of leprous men.O shall me hear an English song again!Still English larks mount in the merry morn,An English May still brings an English thorn,Still English daisies up and down the grass,Still English love for English lad and lass—Yet youngsters blush to sing... more...

INTRODUCTION One Spring day in London, long before the invention of freak verse and Freudism, I was standing in front of the Cafe Royal in Regent Street when there emerged from its portals the most famous young writer of the day, the Poet about whose latest work "The Book Bills of Narcissus" all literary London was then talking. Richard Le Gallienne was the first real poet I had ever laid eyes... more...

CHAPTER I HARD YOUNG HEARTS Behind the Venetian blinds of a respectable middle-class, fifty-pound-a-year, "semi-detached," "family" house, in a respectable middle-class road of the little north-county town of Sidon, midway between the trees of wealth upon the hill, and the business quarters that ended in squalor on the bank of the broad and busy river,--a house boasting a few shabby... more...