VIGIL
By HORTENSE FLEXNER.
I have waited with my mothers down the dim, uncertain ages,
I have waited in the cave and hut and tower,
From the first dawn's nameless fear
To the death-list posted here
I have slain my soul in waiting, hour by hour.
Under pelt of beast, trap-taken, or the leaves by chance winds blow,
Under tunic, peasant hemp, or cloth of gold,
By the fire, in low flame burning,
I have crouched in silence, yearning,
And as now, my helpless heart has waited cold.
Ancient is the part I play—like a cloak of heavy mourning,
I take it, bending, from a million women's hands.
They have worn it, they have torn it,
Agonizing, they have borne it,
And its folds are dark with heart-break of all lands.
Oh, the woman figure standing, with the face toward the horizon,
Oh, the hand above the eyes to ease the strain!
Gaunt and barren, stricken, lonely,
With the empty memories only,
We have stood, the dry-eyed sentries of our pain.
Nothing we can do to stop them, nothing we can say to hold them;
Taking sunlight, laughter, youth, they swing away,
And the things they leave grow strange,
House and street and voices change,
But the women and the burdened hours stay.
I have waited with my mothers down the dim, uncertain ages,
While my children die, I pray the centuries through,
And I wonder in my fear
At the death-list posted here
If God has left the women waiting, too!
Nietzsche and German Culture
By Abraham Solomon.
A Letter to The New York Evening Post.
Sir:
Those who trace the German militaristic doctrines to Nietzsche's influence commit Pastor Mander's sin when he told Mrs. Alving to bar from her library a book which he had never read. Nietzsche was an inveterate enemy of efficiency, astigmatic with regard to practical life, and he never worked out a philosophy in the accepted sense of the term. He was a lyric poet who wrote psychology when he failed to sustain the poetic mood. In the Engadine and at Sils-Maria, brooding in a rocky void wherein he touched the sharp edge of infinity, he sang a Dionysian hymn to life against the melancholy products of German learning and against those Nihilistic snares which he thought lurked in Christian doctrine. There he worked out the mystic idea of "Eternal Recurrence" and his song of Zarathustra with the bell strokes of noon.