. . . . . . . .
He rose, and danced a visible song;
With rhythmic gesture he contended
Against her trance; and proved so strong
That the grapes of his thought wore the bloom of his mood,
While her soul tasted and understood.
“Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat.” A happy simile! We recognize the sensation.
In Judith, one of the group to Moore, a vigorous note is sounded. This is good, and maybe the rest is too; I do not know. It rolls above my head.
The Spirit of Life, a series of nine essays by Mowry Saben (Mitchell Kennerley), is the kind of book that makes me savagely controversial and then cross for heeding it at all. Its platitudinous optimism meanders along through some two hundred and fifty pages under various chapter headings: Nature, Morals, Sex, Heroes, etc. The first sentence is: “There are many great Truths that can be expressed only by means of paradox”; and the last, “If life means nothing, if the universe means nothing, then reform is only an illusory word, which has come to confuse us upon the highway of Despair; but if in our highest ideals we may find the real meaning of our personal lines, because they are the quintessence of the spiritual universe, whose avatars we should be, there is nothing too glorious for the heart of man to conceive.” All in between is just like that.
All persons, and there are many, who are determined willy nilly to believe the world a nice place; who, confronted with the unlovely, the stark, gaping and horrid, cast down their eyes exclaiming “It is not there,” will take solid comfort in The Spirit of Life. It is like the millions of sermons droned out one day in seven all over the land to patient folk who no longer know why they come nor why they stay to hear.