* * * * *
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
When those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?"
THE MAN WITH THE HOE.
"How will it be with kingdoms and with kings?" the "Man with the Hoe" is answering in Russia this star-lit night and sun-illumined day. Yes, Markham is prophet as well as poet. And to this humble writer's way of reading poetry there were never four lines for pure poetry more beautifully writ, neither across the seas, nor here at home, neither east nor west, than these four from "Virgilia":
"Forget it not till the crowns are crumbled
And the swords of the kings are rent with rust;
Forget it not till the hills lie humbled,
And the springs of the seas run dust."
The Shoes of Happiness.
Prophetic? Yes! But ah, the music of it! Here rings and here sings David the shepherd; the sweet lute, the harp, the wind in the trees, the surge of the ocean-reef. It is music of a high and holy kind.
Which reminds me that I am to treat in this chapter on Markham only of what he has written since 1906, the preceding period, best known through his "Man with the Hoe," having been discussed by Dr. Downey in the book heretofore mentioned. I have the joy-task in these brief lines to bring to you Markham's "The Shoes of Happiness," which seems to me the strongest book he has written, not forgetting, either, "The Hoe" book, as he himself calls it.
If you have the privilege of personal friendship with this "Father Poet," he will write for you somewhere, some time, some place, these four favorite lines, with a twinkle in his eyes that is half boy and half sage, but all love, which quatrain he calls "Outwitted":
"He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!"
The Shoes of Happiness.
And with these four lines he introduces the new book of poems, "The
Shoes of Happiness."