After I had pointed them out the way to the high chamber where Fael lodged that night, I stood watching as they went in silent file up the stone stair.  Then I turned and passed out by the postern and down the hill to the encampment of my countrymen.  I knew that behind me Justice was taking her relentless course and that I had been her minister.

Literary Monthly, 1908.

TO KEATS

SONNET[1]

JULIAN PARK ’10

  Where, where is Ganymede?  Where are the fair
  That graced the tales of Ilium years agone? 
  Where are the visions of earth’s aureate dawn,
  When the wing’d bearer bore Jove’s nectar rare,
  When Naiads laughed and wept and sunned their hair
  At sun-kissed pools, deep-recessed, where the fawn
  And satyr sought the sloping cool-cropped lawn,
  And glimpsed the gods and lurking maidens there? 
  Where now is Ganymede, and where is Pan? 
  Where is fair Psyche, where Apollo brave? 
  Are they all fled, affrighted at the span
  Of centuries?  Or sunk beneath the wave
  Of solemn Lethe?  No, rare poet; when
  I scan thy pages they all live again.

Literary Monthly, 1907.

[Footnote 1:  Copyright, 1908, by Julian Park.]

MORTAL VERSE

WILLIAM HUTCHESON WINDOM ’11

The muse of poetry is a lady of many whims.  Fancy, not reason, seems to determine her actions.  She loads the untutored ploughman with the most lavish gifts, while the scholar sits neglected in his study.  She places a golden crown on the brow of the slave and flings a tasselled cap at the master.  And yet the fool’s raiment is worn with as serious and dignified mien as is the kingly crown.  She is a malicious person, and while she keeps a straight face before you, it is a hundred to one that she winks behind your back.  To be most trusted when she is most deceitful, that is her role.

Very few of us have not at some time come under her spell.  The most guiltless-looking has somewhere in the lower drawer of his desk or at the bottom of the tin box where he keeps his old papers, a manuscript, which he at times, half tenderly, half contemptuously, lifts out, after making sure that no prying eye is near. He has caught the muse winking.  Were he still illusioned, that poem would never have wasted its aesthetic fragrance within such close confines.  It would have been most neatly printed in calendar form and sent to appreciative friends.