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The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century by William Lyon Phelps
Book, page 220 / 248


       As I walk down;
   Chimes on the upper air,
   Calling in vain to prayer,
   Squandering your music where
       Roars the black town:

   Bless me once ere I ride
   Off to God's countryside,
   Where in the treetops hide
       Belfry and bell;
   Tongues of the steeple towers,
   Telling the slow-paced hours--
   Hail, thou still town of ours--
       Bedlam, farewell!

Those who are familiar with Professor Beers's humour, as expressed in
_The Ways of Yale,_ will wish that he had preserved also in this
later book some of his whimsicalities, as in the poem _A Fish
Story,_ which begins:

   A whale of great porosity,
     And small specific gravity,
   Dived down with much velocity
     Beneath the sea's concavity.

   But soon the weight of water
     Squeezed in his fat immensity,
   Which varied--as it ought to--
     Inversely as his density.

Professor Charlton M. Lewis was born at Brooklyn on the fourth of
March, 1866. He took his B.A. at Yale in 1886, and an LL.B at Columbia
in 1889. For some years he was a practising lawyer in New York; in
1895 he became a member of the Yale Faculty. In 1903 he published
_Gawayne and the Green Knight_, a long poem, in which humour and
imagination are delightfully mingled. His lyric _Pro Patria_
(1937) is a good illustration of his poetic powers; it is indeed one
of America's finest literary contributions to the war.

   PRO PATRIA

 
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