TRAMPING WITH A POET
IN THE ROCKIES

BOOKS BY STEPHEN GRAHAM

THE GENTLE ART OF TRAMPING
THE DIVIDING LINE OF EUROPE
IN QUEST OF EL DORADO
TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES
EUROPE—WHITHER BOUND?
THE CHALLENGE OF THE DEAD
CHILDREN OF THE SLAVES
A PRIVATE IN THE GUARDS
THE QUEST OF THE FACE
RUSSIA IN 1916
PRIEST OF THE IDEAL
THROUGH RUSSIAN CENTRAL ASIA
THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY
RUSSIA AND THE WORLD
WITH POOR EMIGRANTS TO AMERICA
WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERUSALEM
CHANGING RUSSIA
A TRAMP’S SKETCHES
UNDISCOVERED RUSSIA
A VAGABOND IN THE CAUCASUS
ST. VITUS DAY

TRAMPING WITH A POET
IN THE ROCKIES

BY
STEPHEN GRAHAM
AUTHOR OF “EUROPE—WHITHER BOUND?”

WITH THIRTY-EIGHT EMBLEMS BY
VERNON HILL

D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY
INCORPORATED
NEW YORK LONDON
1936

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
All rights reserved. This book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any
form without permission of the publisher.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

Vachel Lindsay is the poet. He is best known as the author of General William Booth Enters Heaven, The Congo and Johnny Appleseed. He also wrote a highly comical piece called The Daniel Jazz. He is a wonderful reciter, and is aided by a sonorous, heaven-reaching voice. All his poems are written to be read aloud, chanted, or declaimed; in some cases they are written to be danced also, and played as games. In many of his recitations the audience is called upon to take part in choruses and refrains. Thus, in one poem, when Lindsay says, “I’ve been to Palestine,” the audience as one man has to cry back to him, “What did you see in Palestine?” This is rapturously enjoyed by the audience. When you have heard the poet you can well understand that he did not starve when he used to tramp in America and recite to the farmers for a meal and a night’s lodging. He has gained a great popularity.

He is, however, something more than an entertainer. He has a spiritual message to the world, and is deeply in earnest. In a large experience of men and women in many countries, I have rarely met such a rebel against vulgarity, materialism, and the modern artificial way of life. At the same time, despite his poetry, he is almost inarticulate. He has helped me, and here in a way I help him by giving in a new form part of the richness of his thoughts and his opinions.

Vachel Lindsay visited England in 1920, and recited his poems at Oxford and Cambridge and to several groups of friends in London. His mother, Catharine Frazee Lindsay, who accompanied him, was a notable woman in Springfield, Illinois, in religious and progressive activities. She succumbed to an attack of pneumonia this year. But those who met her in this country recognised in her a remarkable figure. At Vachel’s invitation I visited Springfield last summer, and we went to the Rockies, and tramped together to Canada, and this volume is a record of our holiday. A mutual friend of ours is Christopher Morley, who brought us together in 1919. When he heard of our projected expedition he interposed to get some letters for the New York Evening Post. Some thirty-two of these were written, mostly by the camp fire or sitting on the rocks in the sun, and were printed in the Post, where they attracted considerable attention. “Centurion” in the Century Magazine for August wrote: “Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Graham are having a glorious time. As for those of us who must spend the dog-days in stuffy cities and stuffier offices, the picture of the two of them by a camp fire in the Rockies waking to the freshness and glory of a mountain dawn is—well, if there are no future issues of the Century Magazine, you may be sure that the entire staff, inspired by this example, has started vagabonding.” Another, a facetious scribe, wrote: “It is conceded by every one that Stephen Graham’s Tramping with a Poet will some day stand on the shelf of open-air literature beside Travels with a Donkey.”

My thanks are due to the representatives of the Great Northern Railway of America, at St. Paul, who gave us a wonderful collection of pictures, maps, and books, when they heard we were going, on the subject of Glacier Park, which we tramped through. In fact, the railway company would have done a great deal for us, but we eluded their kind care, as was our wish, and got out entirely on our own.

As Vachel Lindsay was an art student before he was a poet, and wrote his first verses as scrolls to be illuminated below emblematic figures, we naturally discussed emblems and emblematic art and hieroglyphics as we tramped together. The emblems in this book are an attempt to express that side of our mutual experience. They have been done by my friend, Vernon Hill, who drew once that very precious work, “The Arcadian Calendar.”

One of the poems is by “Rusticus,” who, anent our adventures, contributed it to the New York Evening Post.

A last point: Vachel is pronounced to rhyme with Rachel, and is spelt with one l. It does not rhyme with satchel. The poet asked me to tell you that.

Stephen Graham

CONTENTS

TRAMPING WITH A POET
IN THE ROCKIES

HAIL TO ALL MOVING THINGS

I. TRAMPING AGAIN

Well, it’s good to be going tramping again. I’ve been sitting in European cafés and reading newspapers half a year, from Constantinople to Berlin, and I’ve only stretched my legs when in strange cities I needed to find a hotel, beating it pleasurelessly on asphalt. Last autumn, yes, I was tramping over the ruins and wreck of the war in France, and the year before that walked across Georgia on the track of old Sherman. But with a purpose, and in lands where after all there are hotels, and one pulls the blinds down when the stars appear.

But now I’ve had a real call from Hesperus and the wilds, and am off with a knapsack and a pot and a blanket, and a free mind—yes, and, I confess, a few yards of mosquito netting. I’ve left a notice, “Not at home,” at my Soho flat, though I don’t spend much time there, anyhow; “Back in half an hour or so,” and there are already four thousand miles between my arm-chair and me.

And as I hasten to the West the link stretches, stretches. Not that my flat could ever be lasting home. Where the lady of your heart is, there is home! And where is she not? The worst thing man ever did to man was to nail him down. So hail to all things and men which move and keep moving.

I am called by one of the most wonderful men who ever broke silence with a song. He belongs to the same sub-species. Yes, a tramping species. His hat has got a hole in it, and so have his breeches. But he is a poet, and he sings of what the world will be when the years have passed away. He can charm a supper out of a farmer with a song. And I who have tramped without music know what a miracle that is. They always said to me, “Chop this wood,” or “Turn that hay,” or “If a man do not work, then neither shall he eat.”

Grande erreur, Mr. Farmer!

“Well, I can’t take to the road,” says Mrs. Farmer. “Look at me!—it’s wuk, wuk, wuk, all day!” Mrs. Farmer was born on a Saturday. I always feel sorry for Saturday’s children. They were born a day before I was. For I was born on a Sunday. How sadly we used to intone it when we were children—“Saturday’s child works hard for his living!” And then the relief, “But the child who is born on the good Sunday, is happy and loving and blithe and gay.” That is the tramp-baby, born on the day of rest.

I am sitting at this moment in the St. Louis train heading for Missouri. The little negro marionette with set smile and the borrowed voice of a ventriloquist has offered coffee, ice-cream, oranges, without response, and now the car-conductor has just put into my hand a tract. It is entitled “Millions Now Living Will Never Die,” and costs 25 cents.

“The emphatic announcement that millions now living on earth will never die must seem presumptuous to many people; but when the evidence is carefully considered I believe that almost every fair mind will concede that the conclusion is a reasonable one.” So the book begins. And you who are spiritually a citizen of Missouri will doubtless require, like doubting Thomas of old, to be shown the very truth in substance and reality.

But the car-conductor has made a mistake. I have not read this book, but I believe. Though I have not seen, I believe and am blessed. And though in the Missouri train, I am not going to Missouri. I am stepping off at Flora, Illinois, to catch the Beardstown local train to Springfield, which unlike St. Louis and Jerusalem and Capernaum, and perhaps more like Tyre and Sidon, is a city of faith where they have bread from heaven to eat.

Not that I am staying in Springfield. But there I pick up the poet. That is where he haunts—“where Lincoln dreamed in Illinois.” The poet thinks that the world could be regenerated from a centre in Illinois—this beautiful state upon which Chicago has thought fit to rear its awful form.

Some one of Illinois, not the poet, wrote to me, “What do you think of Springfield as a centre of world thought?” Now I know the craze of “Boost your home town” can be, and often is, carried to excess, and little Springfield is not even on a main line from New York. But neither is Bethlehem nor the human heart. If you want to regenerate your wicked world you can begin here and now—or, to use the language of the country, put your hand to your bosom and say it—“You can begin right here.” And then, to quote the poet himself, you will have—

Crossed the Appalachians,

And turned to blazing warrior souls

Of the lazy forest.

Springfield will not hold us. But we shall take Springfield with us. We are going to take it in our hearts and place it on the top of the Rocky Mountains, at the Triple Divide, where the waters of the new world flow north and east and west—

Going tramping again,

Going to the mountains,

To recapture the stars,

To meet again the nymphs of the fountains.

To visit the bear,

To salute the eagles,

To be kissed all night by wild-flowers in the grass!

TO HEART’S DESIRE

II. FINDING THE POET

Flora, Illinois, where one changes for Springfield, has a Main Street, and, like many a little town of the Middle West of America, looks rather self-consciously askance at visitors, like the village that voted the earth was flat in Kipling’s tale. For the novel of the hour is called Main Street and is sold to hundreds of thousands of people and read by every American who reads anything, and is bitterly or jocularly discussed at every tea-table. It sheds a bright light on the life of a typical little town in the Middle West. It names the town Gopher Prairie—because the Middle West is prairie land and the gopher-rats or marmots live there in myriads in their little burrows. The novelist seems to suggest that the people themselves are a species of gopher, a little people, limited of view, good-natured, of the earth earthy, but always bobbing-up. Because of the criticism implied in this novel the Middle West would rather now be called the “Central West.”

These Main Streets, however, except for the sophisticated eyes of a college girl inauspiciously married, are probably not so bad as the realist paints them. They are dull, but genuine. They exhibit our modern civilisation without too many shams. See the people working in the heat. The minds of the young are set on their dull jobs and not thinking of drink or sex—it is sufficiently wonderful. There are “Main Street” towns in every country in Europe, and life is dull in them though adorned by fights and drinks and “hussies”—but where will you find such an unexhausted élan and zest for the unornamented reality that America affords? Where else moreover will you find the working-men to-day working in silk shirts? Life in Main Street seems worth while, at least to those who live there.

It’s a by-line from Flora to Springfield, and you plough iron slowly through Illinois corn. An old mechanical car-conductor with grey straw hat and fat stubby face calls the stations one by one in an outlandish accent which to a stranger is entirely baffling. He collects the tickets, and if you are for Springfield he puts a red check in your hat-band; if you are for anywhere else it is a white check. Springfield is now in the mind’s eye as a large place and is printed everywhere in big type. The Springfield Register and the Springfield Journal make showing.

I read the newspapers and then tick off the names of the stations on the printed time-table of the B. and O. folder and patiently await the city and its bard. A four-hour journey in a slow train in England would seem intolerable, but America has a different sense of time and space, and a long time is not thought so long. At last, in the late dusk, behold Springfield, Illinois, and the unmistakable marble of the poet’s face under a small black felt—“waitin’ for me, prayin’ for me,” and certainly not really believing in the act of faith which can bring the mountain to Mahomet. In the literary world when invitations are rife there is a golden rule—Promise everything and do just what you like. So one never really knows whether “Yes, I’ll come,” means yea, yea or nay, nay.

It meant yea, yea this time, and so, getting out of the Beardstown local which pulled up outside the station, behold—two strong men stand face to face and they come from the ends of the earth. Vachel Lindsay rasped out sentences of welcome in broad Illinois and I replied in whispering English, and we bundled along Fifth Street for home. Then mother, of seventy years, tiptoed and curtsied and smiled with the roguishness of a young maid, and brought us in. So we sit now on rocking-chairs and talk while beads of moisture roll ticklingly adown our brows, and it is home.

Vachel is a poetical vagabond. I also am a vagabond. There lies our common ground. He is an old-fashioned hiker of the tramping parson type. He leaves home, as it were to post a letter, and does a thousand or so miles. He made a rule once to travel without money, and he recited his poems to the farmers and their wives for food and a night’s lodging. Like Weston, who tramped with ice-blocks under his hat and water streaming down his neck, he can do his twenty miles a day over a long time and has travelled some huge distances in his day. I for my part hardly believe in tramping for tramping’s sake, but in living with Nature for what that is worth.

To sleep under the stars, to live with the river that sings as it flows, to sit by the embers of morning or evening fire and just dream away time and earnestness, to gather sticks to keep the old pot a-boiling, to laze into the company of strangers and slip out of their company in time, to make friends with bird and beast, and watch insects and grubs—to relax and to be; that’s my idea of tramping. The blessed nights full of dew or rain and breeze, the full length of a ferny bed that Mother Earth provides—don’t they attract, don’t they pull one away from the town! And then the day, with celestial, unadvertised, unpaid-for sunshine or shade, on the rocks, on the tufty hills, beside tiny springs or stream on the stairs of the mountains!

I had an idea I was finding my poet at Springfield—well, I know I shall not find him now till we get to the wilderness. He is yet incarcerated in the home town. He reflects in his soul the grey walls and squat architecture of the city; his nerves are still tied to the leading strings of audiences and friends; his soul, like a rare singing bird lately caught by the curious, flings itself against the bars and pines for the wilderness. All is going to go well with him and us, I surmise, and his eyes will have mountains and stars in them, and his nerves get free of strings and sink into their natural beds for a rest, and his soul, that rarely plumaged, wingéd wanderer ’twixt heaven and earth—well, some one has come to open the cage door and let him fly away, to heart’s desire.

The world will have to send a fowler after him with a net, if it wants to get him back. And to find him—it will be “a long ways.”

The poet was in Fifth Street

Mewed up as in a prison.

He was moping in his bedchamber

All the day long

Far from the mountains and the flowers,

But see, a visitor has arrived

From strange parts.

III. TAKING THE ROAD

We packed our knapsacks at Springfield, and stowed away blankets and socks, a coffee-pot, and a frying-pan. We bought at a ten-cent store knife and fork and spoon, skillet, towels which we sewed into sacks, mugs, and what was labelled “The Mystic Mit—the greatest discovery since soap for cleaning pots and pans.” Lindsay had hobnails put in his old boots and bought a handsome pair of corduroy breeches, which, together with his old black hat, made him look like a tramping violinist. Springfield bade us farewell. We were one night in the train to Chicago and travelled all day north to St. Paul. We were then two nights and a day crossing the great land ocean of Minnesota, North Dakota, and eastern Montana—what was once an unending stage-coach trail to the West.

“This is what I like,” said Lindsay—“the prairie to the horizon, no fences, no stone walls, as in New England. It is all broad and unlimited; that is why since the days of Andrew Jackson all the great politicians have come from the West—the unfenced West. I’d like to put all the Boston and New York people out here on the plains and let the plain men run the East.”

To me, however, it looked a land of endless toil as I saw it from train windows, and I thought of the toiling pioneers and the Russians in the Dakotas, the Swedes and the Germans content to live and toil and be swallowed up at last by the distances and the primitive. European life-rivers have flowed into these deserts and made them what they are. One day their children perhaps will have a Western consciousness, an American consciousness.

We stepped off the train at Glacier Park Station. Some dozen women in khaki riding breeches were waiting on the platform, and six or seven people got out from the tourist and Pullman cars to cross to the great log-built hotel opposite. Then the train started again and toiled onwards to the heights of the divide, whence, as Kipling put it:

They ride the iron stallions down to drink;

To the canyons and the waters of the West.

We spent a night at the hotel and were much amused by the idea of a room with a bath in such a place, and by the notice that you could have your linen laundered in twenty-four hours. There was dancing in the evening in an immense hall lit by red Chinese lanterns and adorned by bear-skins and Alaskan ornaments—a fair company of people, too, though mostly from the West.

We, however, were eager for the road, and set out next morning with blankets and provisions and steered a north-westerly or west by north-westerly course by our compasses, abjuring trails and guides. Our idea was to obtain a cross-section view of the Rockies in their most primitive state unguided by convention. We hoped to realise something of what America was like for at least a hundred years after Columbus discovered it. We were headed for the virgin land.

How quickly did we leave that hotel with its “stopping over” crowd behind! In an hour we were in the deep silence of the mountains encompassed on each side by exuberant pink larkspurs and blanket flowers and red paint-brush. We clambered upward, ever upward, through fresh, young, chattering aspens and then green tangled pinewood—and then also through old dead forests lying in black confusion, uprooted, snapped, stricken, in heaps like the woods of the Somme Valley. Then we walked through new dead forests, burned only last year, and then through brown scorched forests that did not burn, but died merely of the great heat which their neighbours’ burning had caused.

We stepped from log to log and tree to tree, making for the open and the light, with the gaiety of troubadours, and Lindsay seemed romantically happy. I also was happy, and thought of the happy days before the war, when I tramped in this fashion back and forth across the Caucasus Mountains and along hundreds of miles of Black Sea shore. It was pure joy to light the first fire and fry our bacon and make our coffee in the full effulgence of the sun.

Glacier National Park, which we passed through first, is a preserve. It is God’s holy mountain on which no man may shoot. By the laws you are not allowed even to frighten a bird. You may not carry firearms into the region. We were therefore not very agreeably surprised to hear in the thickets the whiz-ping of a gun which some Indians were using. Lindsay nearly got a shot in the head as he got up from luncheon. The fact is, Glacier adjoins the Blackfeet Indian reservation, and the Indians are all hunters by instinct and preference. It is difficult to restrain them. They are a gay, independent, and wild lot. We saw a number of these men with an array of plumes round their heads, steel padlocks in their ears for ear-rings, cow-bells on their sleeves, and chequer-work embroidery on their gay vests and cloaks. They had with them their squaws, fat and handsome women, all swollen out and weather-beaten like fishwives, with high cheek-bones and red-ochre faces. They danced together and skirled in wild Asiatic strains while four intent ruffians in ordinary attire beat upon one small drum with sticks. I seemed to recognise in them some sort of acquaintance to my old friends, the nomads of Central Asia, the Kirghiz—the same sort of faces and the same way of being musical. I have had a similar musical entertainment during weeks and months tramping in Turkestan and Seven Rivers Land. Both Kirghiz and Indians are dying out and both are red. I was struck by the feminine expression of the faces of the Indians and the absence of hair on their lips and chins—as if their males were not male.

However, we soon left the Blackfeet behind, and came out of their forests, and in late afternoon stood high above the lovely length of water which we identified as Medicine Lake.

The Indians are dancing as we enter their paradise,

Our hearts are dancing too.

We love the Indians because they never bent their backs

To slavery,

To civilisation,

To office-desks.

What matter if they are dying out,

They have at least lived once.

I WENT TO A HOUSE
AND I KNOCKED AT THE DOOR
BUT THE OLD LADY SAID
I HAVE SEEN YOU BEFORE

IV. FIRST NIGHTS OUT

We spent our first night in a burned forest beside a sunken pink and grey rock. There was a green carpet of unblossoming flowers as green and romantic as ideal spring, and beside it in contrast the stark blackness of the charred trees all up and down the hill. Hidden from view but twenty yards away was a foaming rivulet with pools.

We bathed and we cooked and we talked and we slept. A great mountain like God Almighty in the midst of His creation was visible to us through the trees. We made our beds soft by pulling the dead red foliage from scorched trees and heaping it under our blankets beside the pink rocks. Lindsay made hot a large stone in the embers of our fire to keep him warm. So we lay down and waited for the night. I looked through black masts and great entanglements to the hills. Lindsay faced a scorched section of the forest all hanging in brown tresses. We listened to the stream below, its music becoming every moment more insistent. We knew that it would lull us all night long.

The mountain cloud then began to come down and roll over the tree-tops, giving them ghostly semblance. That passed, and the stars and the moon appeared and stillness ruled. An hour before dawn we were awakened by the sudden patter of a shower of rain and it was followed by the birth of a wind which came roaring along a ravine and started all the air moving everywhere and all the dead forest creaked and whined. It was our signal to arise.

Lindsay rose like a young lion roaring, rrrah!... and making the mountains echo with his roar. “Let us go up higher,” says he. I read him this. “Put it, ‘Lindsay arose groaning and grunting like a pig under a gate—and let people choose,’” said the poet.

He was in great spirits. “I have never been so free. I start afresh. All is behind me. We’ll tramp to the coast. We’ll tramp to Alaska. We’ll do all the national parks, the same way,” were his impulsive speeches.

As we climbed aloft, following the North-west by our wrist-compasses, and careless of time and space, he sang a disreputable song belonging no doubt to that disreputable past of his when he hiked and begged and recited his poems to farmers—

Why don’t you go to work

Like other men do?

How can we work when there’s no work to do?

Hallelujah, on the bum!

Hallelujah, bum again!

Hallelujah! Give us a hand-out

To revive us again!

“You do look a real honest-to-God tramp this morning,” said I in the language of the country, “with your corduroys burst out at the knees, old red handkerchief round your neck, and devil-may-care look in your eyes.”

We reached the top of a mountain where there was a perfect “cyclorama,” as he called it, and he balanced on his toes, and half closed his eyes in his half upturned face, and turned round and about like a teetotum. Last time I had seen him do this was on the carpet of a London drawing-room in Queen Anne’s Gate to the strains of “Let Samson be a-coming in to your mind.”

This mountain was our first ne plus ultra, for having got to the top of it there was only one thing to do, and that was to go down again. Lindsay tested the echoes from it with “Rah for Bryan!” apparently his favourite war-cry, and then as if in response a slim Indian youth on horseback appeared and seemed much amused by us. He was very red and swarthy, with bright teeth, and rode his horse as if he and it made one. He told us he knew all the mountains and had been to the top of every one except Rising Wolf, which had never been climbed by any one. “It is called ‘Wolf gets up’ in our language,” he explained, and pointed to its snarling and menacing mass upstarting through clouds. “A storm comes from the mountain,” said he in warning, and passed on. He passed and we remained, and we saw no other human being the whole day.

“Just think of the children these flowers would amuse,” said Lindsay. “Millions of flowers—and the only human being we see is an Indian. I’d like to write a song on it.”

But the poetic mood passed. Thunderclouds rose in spectral peaks behind the mountains. Mount Helen grew dark and dreadful, and four phantasmal Mount Helens appeared behind her, the first of white mist, the second of lead, the third of streaming cloud, the fourth of shadow. Rising Wolf entered heaven; a howling, gathering, tumultuous wind roared over all the pines of the valleys and lightning like the glint of an eye traversed the ravine. Clouds swept forward to embrace us and indeed overtook us and soaked us while we sat together on a downward slide and sheltered under a blanket.

The storm passed, but we got drenched to our necks as we walked through dense undergrowth downward to a strikingly prominent clump of gigantic pines which from aloft we had chosen as harbourage for the night. These lifted their fine forms from immemorial heaps of old pine mould, soft and brown and porous. There was a stream near them and we lit a great fire by the water’s edge and hung out a line to dry blankets, coats, pants, socks, and all we possessed.

The heat flew up in armfuls of smoke, in showers of sparks, up to our sagging shirts and heavy blankets. Sparks in hundreds lighted on them, and went out or burned small holes. We walked about like savages the while, wresting dead wood to build ever higher the fire. I pulled down a branch with a tree-wasp’s nest upon it, and brought a cloud of wasps after our bodies, and I paid the penalty in a sting. Thus, however, we dried everything, and we were able at last to make a dry bed in a wet place. But rain came on again at night, and in the intense darkness under the giant pines we lay and heard it, and slept, and then waked to hear it again.

If it rains in the town and if you get caught in the rain

And soaked to the bone—ah what a calamity!

You must have a hot bath, and take some hot toddy;

You must swallow an aspirin and sleep under blankets,

Whilst your clothes on two chairs by the fire will be drying;

You must put on dry clothes in the morning.

It’s different in the mountains,

You can sleep wet and wake wet,

And dry when the weather gets drier,

That’s more fun: try it.

SERAPHICAL SUNRISE

V. GOING UP TO THE SNOW

It cleared up before dawn, but it rained for three hours after dawn. Vachel got up in the night and relit the fire and made himself a hot rock. Coming back into our dark and gloomy thicket, he mistook my form for a bear, and his heart jumped. We lived in expectation of meeting bears. “There’ll just be one heading in the Illinois Register,” says Vachel—“Ate by Bears.” We placed our bacon twenty yards away from where we slept, and hoped tacitly that they would take the bacon and spare us.

Our knapsacks weighed double next morning because of the wet in our things. We got wetter still as we ploughed out through flower fields of a drowned paradise. But an hour before noon the sun broke free and started a miraculous drying of Nature and of ourselves. We seemed to cook in the steam of our own clothes. On the hillside, at last, we decided to rest and we spread out everything to dry, dispensing with most of our clothes, and we lay in the sun in the hot damp of the flowers and let Old Sol stream into us.

Early in the afternoon most of our clothes were dry and, following the compass, we climbed up and up to a great height through primeval forest. The trees were so close that often we could not squeeze between them with our packs. We hustled and bustled and impolitely pushed through branches and umbrage and crossed tiny glades filled with ineffably lovely basket grass, holding aloft their cream crowns of blossom. It seemed to us a great struggle, and Lindsay and I held different opinions as to what we should find when we got to the end of the wood, and both of us were wrong. He thought it would be “the divide.” I thought it might be another ne plus ultra and a sheer descent.

But instead it was a sort of end of the world. Our primeval forest came sharply to an end on a deep, green, wind-bitten line where the branches of the trees were gnarled and twisted and beaten downward. Beyond that was a boulder-strewn upper-mountain region and a wall of rock. We asked no questions as to the morrow, but camped beside a huge stone. It was twelve feet high, but one could creep under it and be safe from the rain. And a few feet away was our first snow-bank. We built a big fire and made tea of melted snow, and Lindsay made ice-cream of sugar and condensed milk and snow which we voted very good, and we made eight or nine hot rocks for our bed.

Because of the mountain-wall above us sunset took place at about four in the afternoon here. But a beautiful evening endured long in the east below us. We were so exalted that we looked a hundred miles over the plains and saw, as it were, the whole world picked out in shadow and sunshine below. Sunset slowly advanced over it all, and with reflected rays from an unseen west the day passed serenely away.

Lindsay, being the colder man, slept under the great boulder, and I smoothed out a recess at the side. I lay beside scores of daintily hooded yellow columbines and looked out to the occasional licked-sweet redness of an Indian paint brush. A chipmunk rudely squeaked at us, and as a last visitor a humming bird boomed over our heads like a night-awakened beetle.

We slept serenely. At two I awoke to see a fleeting half moon, all silver, tripping homeward over the high wall of the mountain with attendant stars behind. But away in the east there was a faint rose light over a bank of darkness. The darkness slowly took sharp contour, and the light that comes before the light of day picked out ten or twelve lakes and tarns which we had not noticed until then. The darkness below the rose quivered with lightning; the zenith clearness grew clearer and clearer, and then, with uplifting hands of glory and light, came seraphical sunrise.

Our bonfire, which had burned red all night, now burned a pallid yellow in the new light, and we brought out our blankets into the open and lay down and slept again in the increasing light and warmth of the new day. Then breakfast at seven and God’s in his heaven. And we washed in the snow, and scores of curlews screamed from rock to rock above us on the road that we should take.

“How new it all is!” said the poet. “It is as if no one ever slept here before and wakened to see what we see or to do the things we do.”

Wrapped in our thoughts we put our packs on our shoulders and meditatively turned our steps to the downward-dropping corner of the mountain-wall which obscured the adventures of the new day.

We cut off the top of the snow with a sharp piece of slate,

And took the purer under-snow to make our coffee,

To make ice-cream:

Fastidious creatures!

And then we stood in the snow-hole

And washed with warm water,

And rubbed ourselves all over with handfuls of sloppy snow—

Disgusting old tramps!

The discreet birds watched us,

The chipmunks squeaked at us,

You didn’t see us.

THE DOWNWARD WAY

VI. DIFFERENT WAYS OF GOING DOWNWARD

For several days now we did not meet a human being or see evidence of the existence of one; nor, though continually imagining that we had found a bit of a trail, did we find either a footstep or a hoof-mark. “I’ve never been before in a place where you did not see tin cans,” said Lindsay. “Why, some of the popular canyons of the West are literally filled with cans. It is not only tourist parties that leave them, but the cowboys live on canned goods and fill the valley with their cans.” Another relief is the absence of advertisements, of all the signs of modern civilisation. You are given without reserve to America as she was.

“I don’t believe in class war,” says Lindsay, as we turn the corner of the mountain-wall. “I believe in the war of the mountain and the desert with the town. Only the deserts and mountains of America can break the business-hardened skulls of the East.”

He wants me to seek with him the source of the American spirit in the mountains of the West. However, reality confronts us and not a dream. We see beyond the wall of the mountain, terrace after terrace and cascade upon cascade, gleaming upward on a sort of endless stairway. To the first waterfall we count eight bays of loose stone and shale. We step from rock to rock, and as my legs are longer this hinders Lindsay more than it does me. He is all for diagonalising downward, or even going straight down, and finding an imaginary easier course skirting the edge of the forest. We, however, try to keep our level, but whether we wish it or no we slide downward at each uncertain step.

At last we come to a bay of tiny, trickling silt, so steep and smooth that a glass marble might roll from the top of the mountain to the bottom. Decent progress along this is impossible, so we decide to toboggan to the bottom, and seat ourselves on broad, flat stones, and guiding ourselves with our hands go off at a rare pace for that imaginary better way at the skirting of the mid-mountain forest. The device reminds Lindsay of an Indian Government agent who had the task of supplying the Indians with all they needed on their reservation.

There came, consigned to him, some very large skillets or frying-pans, which the Indians repeatedly refused to take away, having no use for them. At last one day the chief came in and gladly took away the lot. The agent, curious to know what they were going to do with them, went out to see. He found half the tribe on the hillside and a very gay game in progress—Indians sitting in the frying-pans and tobogganing on the loose shale.

We slid to the bottom like the Indians, but we found no better way down there. The skirting of the mid-mountain forest ran unevenly, now up three hundred feet, now down again, and it was too arduous a way for us. “Let us go down through the forest and seek a trail,” said my companion. Once more we entered the primeval crowd of vegetation, and like police hurrying to some scene of accident, pushed our way through. In half an hour we made good progress downward and came to a sheer cliff over the rivulet of the valley. The cliff was feathered with pines, and we let ourselves down with our hands from the tops of trees, from branches, from stem to stem and trunk to trunk, to the verdant pit of the stream. We clambered downward like two curious Mowglis, but with large humps on our backs, and the humps were our packs. And how these packs of ours pulled us about! We seldom touched earth with our feet and therefore constantly slewed around and dangled with our packs entangled in thick growth.

There was little to console the poet when the water was reached, unless it was the mess of tea we made on a fire on a dank, red rock standing out of the stream. But he was all for fording the water and for trying to find a better way on the other side. This we did, and we climbed up again and then we climbed down. And we found no better way. For no one had been there before us to make it for us.

But we found beautiful quarters at last among the snows and the waterfalls below the pass, and we slept under innumerable stars, lulled by the choruses of many waters. We made breakfast at dawn and talked till it was warm. Vachel told me of his past—how he had struggled always against the downward way. People had said to him, “You must make money. You must enter a profession.” When as an art student he had gained some power with the pencil, they had said, “You must enter commercial art”; when as poet he had been recognised, they had said, “You must let us organise and commercialise your gift, turn it into money for you.” “They wanted to Barnumise me,” said my companion, “and take me all over America as a reciting freak. When I refused, they said, ‘You’ll end in the poor-house,’ and I replied, ‘I don’t care: show me the poor-house—let me go to it.’” He had taken to the road to regain his self-respect. He had gone without any money, and in the hospitality and kindness of the farmers he had won a personal faith in the common man and a reliance which was not merely on success. When he harvested in Kansas for two dollars fifty a day, that daily wage was like millions to him. And now with me, when all the world was telling him he must do thus and so, he was finding in the wilderness of the Rockies a new means of escape.

“To-morrow,” said he, “we will climb right away to the top and find the pass into new country.”

Who said it was easier to go down,

Facilis decensus and the rest?

I’ll say it is more painful

Than to go up.

You think it was great fun a-sliding down the shale

On large flat rocks.

But it leaves me cold,

As the saying is,

For the seat of my pants is much thinner.

THEY OUTSTAYED US AND WILL OUTSTAY US

VII. SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS

My companion’s secret thought is that he is a Virginian. But how, since he was born in Illinois and his parents in Kentucky? “I am a follower of Poe and Jefferson,” he answers. Kentucky was largely colonised from Virginia, and the poet is ready to claim allegiance to the chivalric, leisurely and flamboyant genius of the South. “If only as a protest against the drab, square-toed, dull, unimaginative America which is gaining on us all,” he adds. He has a passion for ideal democracy, and his great hero of the hour as we stride over the rocks is John Randolph, of Roanoke, who could enter Congress with four hounds and a dog-whip and make speeches to which all must listen. “America,” Lindsay insists, “simply needs the flamboyant to save her soul.” I suppose, because of that faith, he also, Vachel Lindsay, the poet, is a flamboyant genius.

The higher we rose in the mountains the more serious became our conversation. We were silent only when we lost our breath. Upon occasion, in this grand and lonely scene, the poet would lift his voice so high that it could have been heard on the mountain on the other side of the valley. His enthusiasm naturally lifted his resonant voice. His political hero is John Randolph or Andrew Jackson, his literary hero is Ruskin, his artist in marble is Saint-Gaudens, his pet hobby is Egyptian hieroglyphics, his passion is the road, and his ideal is St. Francis. Tell it to the mountains and the streams; tell it out! They hear and so do I.

Where we stand is where never man has stood before, or foot of man has trod, and the fresh and virginal flowers on every hand look up at us with mute surprise. We carry our argument higher and higher. We sit and boil our pot beside a bank of purple heather, exalted upon the bare scarp of a sun-drowned mountain, and crackling of roots in the fire blends with strident Middle-West American. We pull up to the black door of a great rock, and the splashing of a cascade splashes through his vibrant tones.

At last, however, the mountains silenced us. They outstayed us, and will outstay us. They ate up our provisions, and swallowed our breath, and beguiled us deceptively to climb higher. “Upward and onward!” was invisibly written on every crag. And we always expected to get to the top in an hour. We finished the coffee, we finished the milk, we finished the bread, we finished the sugar. We got down to a rasher of bacon a day and tea without sugar and milk. Then even the much-loathed bacon got finished, and the problem was to find a “camp” and get more supplies. So we set ourselves seriously to the task of finding a pass over the range.

The poet became much exhausted, and the high altitude evidently affected him more than it did me. We walked quarter-hours and rested quarter-hours, and every time we rested we fell fast asleep. I led up the steep inclines, and we stopped every twenty paces and listened to our breath, I to his breath, he to mine—ao, ao, ao—almost a sob, and waited for the ahoo sound, which meant that the lungs had filled again. After some arduous hours in this wise, we came on our first destitute afternoon, to our first topmost ridge. A cold hurricane seemed to try to stop our final conquest of it, and it went through our bodies like swords. But when we exultantly bore through it we came to a sheer precipice going down to a narrow corridor which led always to the northward.

Vachel punctuates most of his remarks with a wild native yell—“Whoopee Whuh!” but he was down to a whisper now, and could no longer move the mountains with a “Hurrah for Bryan.” Silently and rather mournfully we diagonalised downward to a far blue lake which was the ultimate end of the valley, and the source of the stream we had followed for days. Devastating winds blew across us, and we watched how they descended upon the surface of that lake and tore it off in sprays and circles of water and steam. We found what seemed to be a horse trail over the shingle, but it led to an extensive field of snow, and we recognised only the footsteps of a bear. The lake was not blue, but green when we got near to it, and was banked on three sides by snow.

Said Vachel: “Here, Stephen, is the place to catch a fish.”

I said: “No, Vachel, this is just a snow-melt; there never were any fish here.”

“Nevertheless try!” said the poet.

Now we had purchased fishing tackle, though we had no rods. And Vachel had a large red wooden grasshopper, and I had a large green one.

Vachel said: “You must throw your grasshopper in, and I’ll go light a fire so as to be ready to cook the fish.”

So I fastened my fat green wooden gentleman to the gut, and the gut to the line, and attaching a stone, flung him in the air. Behold, he flew like a grasshopper and disported with the winds. But when he settled at last on the surface of that green and snowy lake, he always made a most rapid progress toward the shore. I sailed him like a boat. No fish came, and even our faith remained unrewarded.

Was not this adventure prophetically put in verses in Alice, where some one sent a message to the fish, telling them, this is what I wish. And the little fishes’ answer was—“We cannot do it, sir, because,”—the little fishes, as was disclosed later, were in bed.

We sat down together in a place like the heath in Macbeth, and the weird sisters were ready to appear, had we been evil. The sun had set, winds were blowing from four directions at the same time, and it was bitterly cold. A tiny fire of roots peeped at us and smoked and chattered, and we tried hard to get warm at it. We looked at the mountain-walls, we looked at our maps and compasses. We thought of the night and of our empty wallets and insides. “Just think of Broadway at this minute,” said Vachel. “Still sweltering in heat, not yet lighted up for evening pleasure.” We felt far from civilisation, and sighed at last for what we despised. “Or think of Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue,” said I, “all a-swarm with the light-hearted summer crowd of London.”

“Well, we can’t sleep here,” said I at length.

“Let us make one last attempt to get over to the other side.”

Vachel seemed surprised, but agreed with alacrity: “I’m for it,” said he.

The greedy old mountains have been to our knapsacks

And eaten up most of our food.

They’ve swallowed our breath and silenced our speech.

But they haven’t broken our hearts.

It takes more than a mountain to do that!

IMPRISONED IN THE VIEWLESS WINDS

VIII. NIGHT AND NOTHING ON THE MOUNTAINS

My companion has a curious old-man-of-the-woods appearance. It is not his loose red handkerchief round his neck so much as his hanging, dead-branch-like arms. His face sleeps even when he is awake. He walks when he is tired in a patient, dog-like way, treading in my very steps. No ribald songs, now, of tramping days—but as if hushed by the hills he croons ever to himself—

O Beulah land, sweet Beulah land,

Lo, on thy topmost mount I stand,

and in a sort of hymnal marching step, like way-worn pilgrims, we take the trackless way upward once again. And it is late twilight. Sombre hope and patience dwell in our hearts as we trudge, trudge upward.

By slow stages we reach a new possible pass, and every time we stop and turn round and sit down to rest we face the lake. On three sides the descent to the water is precipitous, and an overhanging snow-crust goes round. In the late light the surface of the lake is a still, viscous green and the mountain above it a calm blood-red. The snow patches on the mountain are of fantastic shape and give an idea of futurist designs. We stare at the patches and see in one of them a ferocious white tiger, stalking forward with a demented white cat on its back. In another we see an Egyptian figure, slender, with veiled features of awful and eternal significance. These grow in the dusk. The winds chase over us, and when they pass there are moments of windlessness, and we watch hurrying grey rags of clouds running over the brow of the ridge above us and losing themselves in thin air.

It is a romantic climb. We support each other up the steep, sitting down every twenty paces in breathlessness. Vachel sits with his head on my shoulder and I with my head on his. In a minute or so we recover and sit up straight, in the half darkness, and pick up flat stones and try to make them skid over the snow patches. For a moment I was taken back to the romantic vein of “Parsifal” as I saw it in Vienna, last May, and we were Wagnerian pilgrims, toiling upwards in the ecstacy of mystical opera. Somewhere below us, in the lake, all the violins should sob and croon together and aspire, yes, aspire and throb, and the drums should start the gods to look at us. But we treated the matter in light vein. “The Bacon-eaters,” said Vachel sotto voce. “Seventh reel.”

A mighty final effort brought us to the top. I shall not soon forget the dramatic sensation of seeing the new sky which suddenly began to lift itself into our view from out the other side of the mountain, a sky with more light, for it lay in the West. It was as if the prison-wall of the mountain had been thrown down and that which prisoners dream about and rave about had been given us.

And there was a way down. It was night and nothing, but we found a narrow gully on the other side, five or six feet broad, two or three thousand feet down, and an appalling steepness. This gully was all loose stones and boulders which the slightest touch sent clattering or thundering to the bottom. We were nerved to the descent by what we had gone through and by our joy at finding a way out.

I took the lead, clutched the rock wall for support, and began to slip downward, tentatively and cautiously. But directly I started, a wonderful thing occurred. I found the whole body of loose stones under my feet moved with me, and I began a progress as on a moving staircase, down, down, down, as in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth—easily, steadily. Pleasure in this was, however, rudely disturbed. Lindsay had started downward behind me and was naturally starting a movement of rocks on his own, and suddenly a leg-breaking boulder flew past on my track with dumfounding acceleration. I climbed, therefore, away from the moving staircase into a cleft of the rock and waited for the poet to draw level.

It was dark night now, and as the rocks from Lindsay’s feet rushed past they struck bright sparks in the gloom. How they crashed! How they thundered and lurched and thumped, and thumped again, and thudded into the abyss below, and how the little stones rattled after them! We agreed to go downward in short spells, one at a time, and then go into shelter and wait till we drew level again. And as we sat side by side in the gloom we looked to the great mountains on the other side of the new valley and discerned a colossal figure nine in snow, staring at us out of the darkness. It was eerie. It needed a deal of nerve to go on.

And we did not go much further. At one point I thought I saw two human beings, or they might have been bears, struggling slowly upward toward us. I shouted to them and they stopped. But they made no reply and just glowered menacingly upward. That was the end for me. I would go no further. I gave the halloo to Lindsay and got into shelter. He came down the way I had come, laboriously, cautiously, like some weather-beaten old soldier, a skulker from beyond human ken. And he also desired to do no more that night. So we lay in a lair of a beast on the brink of a sheer cliff, far, as it happened, above mist and cloud and a rain that was falling below, and slumbered the night away.

The Guardsman and the Western Bard[1]

Went hiking hand in hand.

They felt uplifted much to see

The prospects wide and grand.

“A thousand leagues,” said one, “Oh Steve,

From any boardwalk band.”

“How fine the air, immense the view!

The trees are large and green.

See! Here are glades and crystal rills,

And every scent and petal fills

Our souls with pure ecstatic thrills.

Afflatus holds the scene!”

The Guardsman pointed to the sun.

“It’s supper time, I mean.”

And as they munched the cracker thin

And quaffed eau naturel,

The gates of heaven were oped—and all

Its liquid contents fell.

They felt the truth that bards have sung:

Heaven is a limpid well.

Then night came on, that covers all

Of high and mean degree,

The king, the clown, the russet gown,

The land, the clouds, the sea.

“And yet I scarcely feel,” said one,

“It really covers me.”

Long time they sought sweet slumber’s balm,

Kind antidote to care.

“O soft embalmer,” was their psalm

That filled the mountain air.

Embalmer! Something rough in pine

Was as all they wanted there.

A chilly dawn illumed the East,

Most wonderfully wet.

And evermore their pangs increased,

Nor heaven’s libations ever ceased ...

(No further messages released

They’re on that mountain yet).

[1] Contributed by “Rusticus” to the New York Evening Post at this point in our adventures.

WHEN HE IS IN PAIN HE CALLETH FOR THE BOTTLE

IX. “WIFE, GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER”

“I suffered forty-seven separate chills,” said the poet. “And forty-seven separate cramps,” said I. Did we sleep? Six hours passed somehow and it seemed not so long as waiting that time for a train or for a theatre to open. Lindsay lay in a sort of hole. I lay with my head half over the abyss. I watched the stars swim out of the clouds above. I saw the blackness of the bottomless below us become grey as the clouds formed there. Lindsay cried out once: “I’m getting up to light a fire.” “Impossible!” I rejoined. “There’s no wood, and no place to light it.”

“I am afraid the clouds are below us; we may have to stay up here all day,” I whispered, an hour before dawn. But it was all the same to the poet, whose thoughts were entirely in the present.

Destiny, however, was kind to us. The clouds at last lifted and drifted, and angels at sunrise lifted white curtains and smiled at us.

A couple of old woe-begone weather-beaten tramps lifted themselves up cautiously and peeped at the wilderness. Last night’s nerve had gone. With backs bent, and sometimes on hands and knees, they picked their way gingerly down to the far snow dump beneath, to the first wind-missed bits of mountain forest, to the first tinkling stream, and to the first chalice anemones and pink paint-brush flowers. We washed and we dressed, and we slept and washed again, and put snow inside our hats—for the morning had become rapidly hot—and we descended. The streamlet foamed down its rocky bed, and we waded and jumped and clung to its sides. And other streams flowed into it and made it deeper and the current stronger, and it splashed us above the waist. We waded knee-high through pools where shadowy fishes darted, and we sat to rest on shiny rocks in the water and talked of desirable foods. We scanned the map of the Geological Survey and stared at our compasses and considered the contours of the hills, and at length were rewarded by the sight of a real human horse trail with indisputable hoof-marks upon it.

We found this in the afternoon, and for three hours followed doggedly, without meeting a soul. At last, to our great joy, we came upon a trivial enough thing, and that was a piece of candy wrapping. “Those who eat candy do not stray far from the place where candy was bought,” said I sententiously.

“Well argued, sir,” said Lindsay. “I fully agree.”

And, indeed, before sunset the happy augury was fulfilled, and we found a camp much used by Montana fishermen. Curiously enough, though all other wild things are preserved in the National Park, the fishes are allowed to be caught. In our opinion, however, after some experience, the fishes do not stand in need of protection.

At the camp we resumed acquaintance with the human race in the person of the keeper and his wife, a fire-ranger, and a hired maid called Elsie. They filled up our cans and gave us a pail of boiling water to wash our clothes, and thread for our trousers and coats, and a week’s rations to take us to “The Sun.” They were disappointed that we would not buy bacon.

“Bacon,” said the camp keeper, “is my long suit.” But Vachel vowed he had gone over to the Mosaic point of view, and didn’t care if he never tasted bacon again.

Instead, we “filled up” with corn-beef hash and took into our packs raisins and grape-nuts and butter; double quantities of bread and sugar and milk, and nine packets of comforting lozenges. And we saw by the Spokane Advertiser of some remote date that the King and Queen of England had been to Ascot races in person, and no one knew what was happening in Ireland, or whether De Valera was a Protestant or a Catholic, and the fire-ranger confessed he did not know the ins and outs of Sinn Fein. And no, there had not been a forest fire this year yet, though he evidently lived in hope.

So the poet and I fortified ourselves materially and spiritually, and set off again for the North-west. We started on our new rations and had one of the most jovial of meals in a place where evidently people had once camped before. We found the charred circles of old camp-fires in the grass.

While we were resting under the trees, and in the gleam of the firelight, Vachel told me the story of how once, in Kansas, he “ate down” his landlord. He had hired himself out with a gang of others to harvest the wheat on the land of a certain German farmer. All the week-days they “piled the golden sheaves,” and it was a red-hot July. The men ate as much as they were able, slept in barns on the hay when the day was done, slept like the dead, rose with the dawn, and certainly did bring in the wheat. For this they got two dollars fifty a day and were proud of their gains.

On Sunday, however, work was suspended, and the gang just lazed and dozed and ate. The German was a pious Catholic, and said a longish grace before and after meals. As the gang were rather sheepish regarding religion, they generally let one course pass, just to avoid the grace, and came slouching in as the meal went on. But Vachel started in with the first grace, right level with the farmer himself. Whatever he had Vachel had. He had several helpings of everything on the table, and as each of the ten harvest hands came in Vachel started afresh with him, and as he had hash he had hash. As each man thought he had done, he slunk out so as to avoid the second grace. The farmer kept piously waiting for all the men to get finished, and helping himself with them, too, just for company.

At last all seemed to have finished and gone, and the farmer was about to pronounce the final blessing when he had an afterthought and took another piece of pie. So Vachel also took another piece of pie. Then mechanically the last grace was said. “I went over to the barn and lay down and slept,” says Vachel. “By supper time I was ready for another meal, and I sat down again with the farmer before the rest of the gang had arrived and grace was said. The farmer was about to help himself when suddenly he paused, spoon in hand, and sat back in his chair, looking ill.”

Then, in a loud, stentorian voice he called to the kitchen: “Wife, give me the pain-killer.”

He had a violent fit of indigestion. Wife then brought a large bottle labelled PAIN-KILLER, an astonishing bottle, about a foot long, that looked as if it might be horse liniment, and the farmer took his dose with a large iron spoon. “A terrible stuff,” says Vachel, “a stuff that just eats the inside out of you, one part turpentine, three alcohol, and the rest iron rust. It gives you such a heat you forget about your indigestion.”

So the farmer had his pain-killer, but he did not eat any supper, and the poet and the rest of the gang as they came went gaily on and ate to the end. “I began with each man as he came in and ate him down,” says my hungry companion suggestively. “And the farmer, tasting nothing, had to wait till all were through to say the final grace. We finished at last and went all of us to the barns to sleep till Monday morning and the hour when we returned again to the golden line.”

The kiss by hopeless fancy feigned

On lips that are for others,

Does not compare with the imaginary meal

You eat when the wallet is empty.

The kiss too, when you get it,

Oft proves a disillusion;

But the first meal after an involuntary fast,

Well!

It takes a real poet to describe that!

X. CLEAR BLUE

After telling me how he “ate down” the farmer, Vachel rested and passed into a halcyon mood. We had a heavenly day climbing towards a heaven of unclouded blue. Swinburne flowed more naturally from the poet’s lips than conversation:

Before the beginning of years