Professor Charlton M. Lewis was born at Brooklyn on the fourth of March, 1866. He took his B.A. at Yale in 1886, and an LL.B at Columbia in 1889. For some years he was a practising lawyer in New York; in 1895 he became a member of the Yale Faculty. In 1903 he published Gawayne and the Green Knight, a long poem, in which humour and imagination are delightfully mingled. His lyric Pro Patria (1937) is a good illustration of his poetic powers; it is indeed one of America's finest literary contributions to the war.
PRO PATRIA
Remember, as the flaming car
Of ruin nearer rolls,
That of our country's substance are
Our bodies and our souls.
Her dust we are, and to her dust
Our ashes shall descend:
Who craves a lineage more august
Or a diviner end?
By blessing of her fruitful dews,
Her suns and winds and rains,
We have her granite in our thews,
Her iron in our veins.
And, sleeping in her sacred earth,
The ever-living dead
On the dark miracle of birth
Their holy influence shed….
So, in the faith our fathers kept,
We live, and long to die;
To sleep forever, as they have slept,
Under a sunlit sky;
Close-folded to our mother's heart
To find our souls' release—
A secret coeternal part
Of her eternal peace;—
Where Hood, Saint Helen's and Rainier,
In vestal raiment, keep
Inviolate through the varying year
Their immemorial sleep;
Or where the meadow-lark, in coy
But calm profusion, pours
The liquid fragments of his joy
On old colonial shores.