horse stumbled and recovered in turning the corner. She turned to glance at the clock. It was only seven minutes of nine. She walked across to the table. A fork was tilted over the edge of the plate of cold chicken, and two cigarette butts lay soaking in the dregs of a green teacup.

The clock clicked. The girl started slightly, and stood looking at it, holding the tiny gold key against her breast with both hands. There was an odd suggestion in her attitude of the way a mother holds her child. The clock clicked again. It would go on clicking out the minutes sixty to the hour, twenty-four hours to the day, three hundred and sixtyfive days to the year... . . She snatched the clock suddenly from the mantel, and threw it with all her strength against the brickwork of the fireplace. It did not fly theatrically into fragments, but rolled face upward with a tinkle of glass, and lay there curiously unaltered in appearance. She stood a moment looking quietly down at it.

"I can't understand God," she said.

Brian Hooker.

MIDNIGHT IN EUROPE, TWILIGHT IN NEW YORK

BY HERMANN HAGEDORN

THE Old World sleeps.

Over the wall of sea, dusky and wild-
Where the great tempest sweeps
Untramelled, as a god that leaps

Forward to kiss the laughing wave, his love

The New World, like a sleepy child

Whose small diurnal round is run,

Turns, too, her fair face from the sun.

The Old World sleeps, and in the dome above

The midnight constellations gleam

Over the shadowy shores, over the silent stream.

The mighty river dumbly flows.

By friendly wharves, the vessels dark,

Save one dim spark

That high upon the masthead glows,

In spectral solitude repose.

The red-roofed thorps, 'neath linden-bough and oak,
Clustered like berries in their leafy cloak,

Dim at the foot of some north-warding hill,
Sleep in a dreamless slumber and are still.
Over the breathing fields the wooded knolls,
Kindly as some old nurse keep zealous guard.

No light nor sound-only at intervals

A fettered comet, many-starred,

That on its steely path through the still country rolls With distant thunder and the whistle's calls.

The Old World sleeps.

Dim, storied cities, indolent

With dreams and placid self-content;

Where even Time her hasting wings

Folds, and with generous hand o'er spire and wall,

O'er crooked street and dingy court and empty manor-hall,
Her sweetest gift, her veil of mystery flings;

Cities, where jarring progress creeps
And wise professors still prefer

Nodding o'er Latin roots with two or three

Than in the outer world's unresting stir

Wringing from multitudes an immortality:

Mute by their turgid streams the dreaming cities lie.
Scarcely the tired night-watch their vigil keep;
Even these cities sleep.

Only in giant capitals the night

Brings not the silence and the well-carned rest.
Garish above them hangs the light

Mirrored from thoroughfares and wide cafés
And dazzling signboards hanging in midair
That undulating blaze.

An indistinguishable hum

Of many voices fills the street,

Where the defiled,

The idle, painted, overdressed,

The innocent, the fond beguiled,

The Jew, the Gentile, on a level meet,

And prince and pauper's child,

In Night's delirium.

In restaurants the tired musicians play
Through the long night again and yet again
The numbing strain

Of some light waltz that has its day.
The women chatter as they go in pairs,
Or on the corners singly stand and watch
The endless press

Of petty clerks, of millionaires,

Of pallid youths whose tale is told at twenty,
Of idle lookers-on at life who gaze but never guess

That underneath the very wickedness

Is anguish, dread and loneliness a-plenty;
That underneath the habit of desire

Lives something higher

Than passing cynic eyes may catch

A gleam of God beneath the scars,

A flickering, aching longing for the stars.
Yet, once again the whirlpool drags the forms
Onward and downward to the crags and storms.
Midnight and dusk-the New World goes to rest.
Midnight is here, but overseas the day
Still hangs upon her mother's breast
An instant while the sunbeams play
On churches' glimmering vanes,
And higher yet and higher

Burst to fire

Copper and golden on the window-panes
Of slender buildings towering o'er the bay.
Even in the great metropolis, the May
Has entered now in girlish loveliness.
In the dark churchyard where the dead
Sleep undisturbed in the engirding press
Of titan warfare and the meaner stress
Of broods that daily battle for their bread-
The elms rise up out of the desert's core
And brightly clothe their naked boughs once more.
Over the graves the young grass springs,

The robins hop from mound to mound;

And now the twilight brings

An end to whirr of feet and clanging traffic's sound.

From every portal streams the eager horde

Old men and young, women as strong as they,

Courageous as the Amazons in fray,

Counting no man their lord;

But playing each and each her part:

Honor to them! for they are strong of heart.

Out of the gates, women and men and boys,

Homeward they go out of the battle's moil-
Vigorous, free, bred at their birth to toil,

Toil in their eyes, and in their ears the noise
Like a sweet music, of the city's life,
Stirring their youth to strife.

And now the mighty buildings sleep.

Like insects through the gorge-like streets, in clouds
To north, to east, to west the thousands sweep.

The riverboats are black with crowds.

See, how they dot the slanting bridge and pass

Into the lighted cabins, how they mass

On the wide decks, shoulder to shoulder stand
While the chains rattle and the quick gong sounds.
Out of the dock's great open jaws, the boat
Moves to the farther strand.

A city's population is afloat,

Passing at twilight from the narrow bounds
Of its captivity-but to go back

Upon the morrow to the wheel and rack.

Like ghosts that melt before the sun

The city's toilers when the day

Nods to the night and work is done.

Into the twilight fade away.

The peopled towers and the populous streets
Deserted lie as though an age had passed
Since man had last

Marked them with triumphs and defeats.
Dark silence and the memory of woe

Hold concourse in that place, and chill and low
Run whispers of man's hunger and man's greed,
His sorry crowns, his bitter wounds that bleed;

And ghosts are there, huge shapes and things that move.
But not in street or by-street, not in the towers above.

That one face undisfigured, the face of kindly love.

The Old World sleeps, and overseas

The New World lays her tools aside.

Night is about you! Night the fever-eyed,
Night shall appease.

Children of two worlds-rest at ease.

Hermann Hagedorn.

LOOKING AND FORWARD BACKWARD IN MUSIC*

BY FREDERICK R. BURTON.

MUSIC has come to one of those stages in its history where it pauses in some uncertainty for a moment, and strives to take account of itself. Its symptoms of unrest and doubt are manifested in the rather general complaint of professional critics concerning the undue complexity of contemporaneous works, in the fact that the works themselves frankly contravene accepted canons of the art, thus bringing us to face the necessity of deducing new laws of form, or of relegating the most imposing creations of the day to the scrap heap, and finally, in an output of books that cannot clearly be classified in a single sentence but that indicate a deep searching on the part of their authors into the nature of music, and that look, some of them forward and some of them backward, for the truth.

In the general cry over the art there are audible voices of recalcitrants who would, if they could, ride across the country in stage coaches to hear the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. Such are always with us, no matter what the century, and they count little, one way or the other, in shaping the course of the art. There are also those who venture openly to condemn the foremost exponents of musical modernism, but their voices are not very loud, or insistent; their exceptions are taken with a deal of discretion, and there flutters in their utterances a chastened note of reserve which may be traced unfailingly to the mortification of those Don Quixotes of criticism who, within the memory of living man, abolished Wagner and his works from the face of the earth. The prevailing tone of the current literature of music appears to be one of inquiry rather than of assertion; we collate and examine the facts of the past with a view to deduce some rule of development whereby we may be sure not so much as to the future of music as to the value of its present manifestations.

'The Threshold of Music. By William Wallace. New York: The Macmillan Company.

The Psychology of Singing. By David C. Taylor. New York: The Macmillan Company.

The Evolution of Modern Orchestration. By Louis Adolphe Coerne, Ph.D. New York: The Macmillan Company.

The Analysis of the Evolution of Musical Form. By Margaret H. Glyn. New York: Longmans, Green and Company.