AN OLD MAN'S WINTER NIGHT As we are too sad for the other here—

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois, on 10 November, 1879. His parents both came of Kentucky families, and maintained their Southern sympathies (as does their son) even in Republican Springfield, within a few blocks of the Lincoln home, and in a house where Lincoln had been given parties by his sister-in-law. Mr. Lindsay's father was a physician, and his mother, before her marriage, a teacher of literature and painting in a Kentucky college. They both had traveled in Europe, and after their marriage they spent their summers abroad when they did not camp “like cinnamon bears" on Mount Clinton, in Colorado; and once they made a journey to China. In the Lindsay home there were many books, most of them relating to Europe, none of them relating to New England. One which Mr. Lindsay knew thoroughly when still a very young boy was Rawlinson's History of Egypt. Another was Chambers's Encyclopedia of English Literature, through which he came to know in particular Chatterton, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and Dryden. These were discoveries as interesting to him as were certain Egyptian kings, and another discovery valued as highly as an Egyptian king was E. A. Poe. He has said (Preface to Collected Poems): "There was not even a picture of Poe in the histories of American literature taught in the High School when I entered it. There was nothing to be found but the full-page portraits of a famous mutual-admiration society. I knew exactly Poe's opinion of these whiskered worthies. I had read his complete works, criticism and all, through and through, before I was fourteen. I could use his whip. I could quote his critical headlines, that brought blood. I was a kind of literary outcast, because I championed Poe and his view."

In 1897 Mr. Lindsay was graduated from the Springfield High School, and he spent the following three years at Hiram College (Ohio), where all of the students were enthusiastic orators, and where he practiced verse-writing attuned to the rhythms of oratorical prose. Instead of remaining to take a degree from Hiram College, however, he went in 1900 to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he remained three years. His mother had from his infancy intended him to become an artist, and he was now seeking to fulfill her wish. From Chicago he proceeded to the New York School of Art, where he studied under Chase and Henri in 1904 and 1905. He has said that the one consistent thread in his life is the fact that he has always been, and still is, an art student, but it would appear that there are two threads. For he has also consistently been a preacher, a propagandist, a reformer, a prophet of the millennium, and his pictures (hieroglyphics, as he calls them, meaning that they are symbols of his vision) and verses have been for him, not ends, but instruments. Moreover, he acutely needs an audience and has worked hard for one, not hesitating to abandon one means or method for another, if change promised success. In this, if he has employed methods akin to the vulgar politician's, he has of course been honest in intention, hoping to lead his public around, once he has it, to his own objectives;-as is shown in some of his most recent utterances by his naïve but discreet annoyance over the fact that his public obstinately persists in wanting from him only amusing and stirring recitations, and will not listen patiently to his real message.

Mr. Lindsay obeyed the call to teach in 1905, and for three winters was a Y.M.C.A. lecturer in New York. But in 1908 he decided that his native town, Springfield, was the proper place for him to find and create and preach an authentic "United States beauty," and to it he returned. During the next two years he was employed as a lecturer by the Springfield Y.M.C.A. and by the Anti-Saloon League, but was repudiated by both when he began to mix his aims with theirs. He was likewise actively discouraged by the citizens of Springfield, who either did not understand or could not seriously regard his apocalyptic dream of a Springfield regenerated by the love and pursuit of beauty, and thus leading the rest of the world towards an aesthetic millennium. Some apparently thought that he was insidiously preaching a political revolution. Only a small circle of Swedenborgians, a devoted teacher of former days, and a few others remained his friends. From the Swedenborgians he learned much, and was confirmed in his apocalyptic zeal, though he did not formally join the sect. At the same time he was unsuccessfully submitting drawings and verses to every art editor and literary editor in New York, so that both at home and abroad he was told plainly, or by implication, that either he must subdue himself to produce what was commercially acceptable in art and poetry, or he must beg. He accepted the alternative and, as a spectacular act of defiance, calculated to impress Springfield, if not a larger public,

he made three journeys afoot as a beggar, preaching the gospel of beauty, reciting poems, and giving away drawings and verses (in particular a pamphlet entitled Rhymes to be Traded for Bread).

It was his first-hand acquaintance with the work of the Salvation Army, gained while he was a beggar, which inspired him to write the earliest of his better known poems, General William Booth Enters into Heaven. This was published with other poems in 1913, but the volume failed to attract the public, and his widespread fame dates only from the appearance of his second volume, The Congo and Other Poems, in 1914. In this volume he achieved a blend of “jazzy" rhythm with rhyme and religion which at once caught the popular ear and fancy, particularly when chanted by Mr. Lindsay, who has toured the United States and England and Canada, intoning his poems and fairly acting them out upon the platform with great effect. In following up this success he has been trying, he has explained, to create in the public a "higher vaudeville" imagination by writing in emulation of classical Greek poetry which was half-sung, half-spoken. He has at any rate discovered a completely appropriate medium, of vast popular appeal, for the expression of his immense vitality and his exuberant, whimsical fancy. And his serious themes he has occasionally succeeded in transmuting perfectly into powerful and moving He is, however, a very uneven and uncritical writer, apparently unable to distinguish enthusiasm from inspiration, and has produced a great quantity of absurd and worthless verse which in his Collected Poems (1923; revised and illustrated edition, 1925) tends to obscure the slender veins of gold. Other volumes which have been incorporated in the Collected Poems, besides the two mentioned above, are: The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems (1917), and The Golden Whales of California and Other Poems (1920). Three additional volumes of poems are: The Daniel Jazz and Other Poems (1920), Going-to-theSun (1923), and Going to the Stars (1926). Mr. Lindsay has also published two volumes which have issued out of his experiences as a beggar, Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914) and A Handy Guide for Beggars (1916); and also a study entitled The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), and a "sealed book of prophecy," The Golden Book of Springfield (1920). He still calls Springfield his home, but spends a part of every year at Gulf Park College (Mississippi), and other time in traveling, when he is not on one of his "national reciting tours."

verse.