I choose a valley of the Middle West
For the setting of my story. For the time
It starts as eighteen-ninety passes crest
And oak-trees yellow at a touch of rime,
And spell of Indian Summer unexpressed
Dies while the pumpkins ripen, and sublime
Visions of decay oppress the intellect,
Poor beauty with mortality infect.

Out of a pyre of fiery oak and maple
Rose Conway College's Neo-Gothic spires,
Red brick, of course, for red brick is the staple
The eighteen-ninety mise-en-scene requires.
The sun was setting, and purple more than papal
Bathed the brash turrets, while benignant fires
Glanced on green copper finials, or slept
On the blue slates where ampelopsis crept.

Young Doctor Prescott drank the ample air
Of the soft Autumn, and watched the webs of rose
Hung in the West. A tang was everywhere
Of gusts approaching whence the Chinook blows.
Frost underneath you on rising moon would glare,
The lovely enfant perdu of the snows,
Beauty o'erthrowing beauty. With a sigh
He stood to watch the Western pageant die.

Voices cut through the soft dusk from the glen
Where to itself the little stream conversed.
Followed by a drum-like thudding sound. And then
Up from the meadow a dark object burst,
And, like a planet swum into his ken,
In a great arc the flaming sky traversed,
Reached a vast height, and, plunging to the ground,
Gave forth anew the thudding drum-like sound.

" Well, that's enough, " a voice cried. There appeared
Two stalwart striplings heavy-built and tall.
One, golden-headed, with a ruddy beard,
Under his arm-pit, hugged a Rugby-ball.
Professor Prescott eyed them as they neared,
And smiled a greeting. He could not recall
Their names, but knew them for ingenuous asses
Who made sad work of Horace in his classes.

The shorter of the twain was black-avized,
With a cleft chin and an imperious eye,
With something only semi-civilized
About his look, you could not quite say why.
As he gazed at him, Prescott was well apprised
That, howso hard a classicist might try,
There was something in that brain's integument
No Latin verse would ever circumvent.

Sheepish the twain regarded their mild shepherd,
Although the dark-eyed elder of the two
Looked far less like a sheep than like a leopard,
With a queer contemptuous glance, as if he knew
How hot the burning dish of life is peppered
With what disastrous spice. Black flame shone through
His burning eye-balls. For all his youth, a grim
Immalleable hardness ruled in him.

But he said, " Good evening, " pleasantly enough,
As Prescott struggled to recall his name,
And his blond companion threw a painful bluff
At nonchalance, while blushes went and came
Across his Nordic cheek. Though big and tough,
He was shyer than a school-girl just the same,
And knew that awe with which the Middle West
Once viewed Professors whatever they professed.

The dark-eyed, with a half glance at the blush
That lit his comrade's visage like a flame,
Explained to Prescott: " I am centre-rush.
" Anderson's full-back. Tomorrow there's a game
" With Gambier College — Yes Sir, I'm Jack Lush.
" I guess you think our Latin's pretty lame.
" We know some foot-ball even if we are thick.
" And Anderson at any rate can kick. "

Relieved they walked away, while Prescott went
To see what first had drawn him to the spot,
Namely a tract of woodland white-oak sprent,
Which real estate promoters called a lot —
A term he hated. Dreamily he spent
The Autumn twilight while white Venus shot
Her Western silver. His dreams were quiet, but
Hinged on a nice girl in Connecticut —

A girl so nice that she was coming West
When the green bud should sweeten the New Year,
And full of charm that cannot be expressed,
Except in dreams the secret heart holds dear.
And he was soon to feather her a nest
By that sweet glen where the gay stream ran clear.
He cherished visions it was good to rouse
Of a small cottage set in dogwood boughs.

No wonder then if Autumn afternoon
And diademed twilight found him wandering there,
Dreaming 'neath a soft planet in a swoon
Upon the couches of the amorous air,
Or if those football-players struck a tune
That jangled with his dream of otherwhere.
Still, he reflected, they were only boys
Whose natural rights were dirt and sweat and noise.

He even thought of his own college green
Where not ten seasons earlier even he
Himself had been an actor in a scene
In the same style. The tragi-comedy
Of sport he knew, and all that it must mean
To Anderson and Lush. And sympathy
For their young notions in his spirit came,
And he resolved to see tomorrow's game.

With the next dawn the Indian summer died.
The day came robed in dun and over-cast.
A killing frost was o'er the country-side.
A breeze from the North-West grew to a blast.
Snow-flurries hastened by with angry stride,
But here and there the " wrapped enthusiast "
Fought his way to a cow-field through the storm,
Stamping his feet in the effort to keep warm.

There over night had risen two white goals,
Lonely that towered out of the iron ground,
And breathing stream, perhaps two hundred souls
Stood patiently, or sadly wandered round.
Most of the watchers hunted out their holes
Ere the last hero of the day was downed.
Enthusiasm often loses hold
Upon the spirit if the feet are cold.

Still Prescott thought it was a gallant sight,
As the runner hit the tackler with a thud,
And splendid boys struggled on full of fight,
Or kissed the bosom of their Mother Mud.
And I am half inclined to think him right.
Football like war, for all the gold and blood
Wasted upon it, brings right into play
Virtues a man finds useful any day.

What pleased him best was the fair attitude
Of thoughtless valiance that breaks but will not bend,
Which makes Discobolus himself look crude
And posed — the linesman leaping to defend
The breach the adversary's wit has hewed,
The racing half-back sweeping round the end,
And the indescribable and panther grace
Of the last tackler waiting in his place.

I have forgotten how that game came out,
And whether it was tied or won and lost.
Nor do I care, though victory turned to rout.
How many times the various line was crossed
May interest statisticians without doubt,
But never me with ten degrees of frost.
One thing I know. Though the glass drew near zero,
Anderson in some way became a hero.

And Conway bore him shouting from the field,
As the game ended, and the blizzard urged
His lances on in earnest. And they pealed
The college-bell, and citizens emerged
On ice-bound sidewalks where the slush congealed,
Supposing that a conflagration surged,
Whence the tradition binding to this hour
That none may ring the bell in Conway Tower.

Except on Feast-days, or for fire or flood,
Sudden death or analogous disaster.
Prescott next morning plowing through the mud
To chapel, met Lush with a sticking-plaster
Over his nose, and one eye dark with blood
Coagulate. The sheep observed his pastor,
And said: " Professor, you'll be glad to hear
" We're going to play Gambier again next year. "

With utter seriousness he fell explaining
Just how important this was in his view
He talked of punts and dropkicks and of gaining
Innumerable yards by plunging through.
He had a thousand theories of training,
And bored Professor Prescott black and blue,
Who was naturally too courteous to suggest
That other subjects had their interest.

And Lush was very great upon one head.
Football would put old Conway on the map.
" We're a freshwater College, " so he said,
" For which those Easterners don't give a rap.
" We're going to show them that the West's not dead.
" We've got our eyes already on a chap.
" He's promised Anderson he's coming here.
" My father's going to stake him for a year. "

And right there Prescott felt a vague hostility
Kindling within him. It appeared a shame
That a gladiator's hideous agility
And prowess in what ought to be a game
Should win him what a young man of ability
Would give an eye for. He was about to frame
A tart opinion, when Lush's blackened eye
Lit, as he said: " There's Anderson. Good-bye. "

The green bud sweetened the New Year at last.
His cottage rose up slowly, beam and strut.
And ere its whitest bract the dogwood cast
To winds of April, from Connecticut
The damsel came to whom he was joined fast
In holy bands. The garden-gate was shut
On Eve and Adam in a summer dream,
While in the meadow laughed the little stream.

September came, and many girls and boys.
(The West, you know, devised co-education.)
It seemed to Prescott that they made more noise
Than heretofore, and had less concentration
As to their tasks. But his domestic joys
Absorbed him, and a versified translation
Of Ovid. Yet he somehow grew aware
Of something — Was it football? — in the air.

Lush sought him the first morning with a giant,
Shambling and elephantine, at his heel,
Who cast a look half frightened, half defiant
At Prescott, and gripped his hand with grip of steel.
The upper-classman, easy and self-reliant,
While the huge boy to his toes made vague appeal
And alternated burning red and pallor,
Told Prescott that the mighty man of valor.

Was in His Horace and his Virgil section,
As if with an intention to imply
Professor Prescott might by indirection
Conceive a compliment was paid thereby.
Vast was the creature, sallow of complexion.
Craggily gaunt, his stature reached the sky.
His vacuous eyes rotated in a head
That looked like Lincoln's, but their glance was dead,

And their dull motion was perturbed and slow
As a Nation article on a well lost cause,
Or the first night of any Yankee show,
Slow as an actress to ignore applause.
Crablike his glances wavered to and fro.
Mechanically he opened his huge jaws,
And closed them without utterance again,
While slow embarrassments besieged his brain.

Prescott observed him daily as he strove
With the complexities of Roman thought.
Agamemnon in the net the harlot wove
Was not more irremediably caught,
When the axe was lifted in the dreadful grove.
The oaf recited with a glance distraught,
And as devoid of sanity or hope
As a nigger's when the lynchers knot the rope.

His name was Swett. He had no sense at all.
Yet Prescott hardly knew him when he saw
The elephantine creature bear the ball
Amid the battle. The semi-simian, raw
Look had departed, and imperial
The jack-ass ruled the whirlwind, and his paw
Crashed downward with its overwhelming weight,
Like Brennus' sword, the trembling scale of fate.

Gambier was humbled in the dust that year.
Terrible was the ruin wrought by Swett.
A cross between a tiger and a deer,
He was a tribulation and a threat.
Anderson's glory scarcely shone so clear,
And Lush's tactics which won many a bet,
Were in the sequel tacitly ignored
By the plaudits of the enthusiastic horde.

Two thousand people by the sidelines milled
That afternoon, as the gold twilight mellowed.
High over all female falsettos trilled,
And all undrilled the male spectator bellowed,
When his favorite demi-god was maimed or killed.
In fact I own a clipping torn and yellowed,
Which indicates that Conway's peerless cheer
Was not invented till the ensuing year.

At any rate 'twas then they charged admission
For the first time, and the first grandstand rose.
But pardon me. Historic erudition
Is out of place in poetry or prose.
Gambier went home in horror and contrition
With broken heart, black eye, and bloody nose,
While Conway round the bonfire catfits threw,
Intact of heart, but battered black and blue.

Nonetheless Prescott when a week had passed
Beheld that Telamonian Ajax Swett
Glaring upon the blackboard, all aghast,
Where the last questions of the term were set.
His slow brain faltered, for he was stuck fast,
And could envisage no device to get
Out of his intellectual Bog Serbonian.
Tears formed in his dull eyes, poor Telamonian.

Passed his brief glory, the sad paladin
Would be, in the language of the people, flunked.
The grid-iron triumph might be his to win,
Not so the honors of the tongues defunct,
As he stumbled over every ad and in,
Without an inklng of the mood subjunct-
Ive, and his so-called intellectuals cracked
Before conditions in accord with fact.

But a worse thing lay behind the sad foreboding
That Prescott on the giant's features saw.
He had not guessed what forces had been goading
The moron's spirit with a poisoned claw.
Half of Swett's screed was mere brain-rot corroding.
The other half was fair without a flaw,
Identical in its Ciceronian twist
With the paper of the prize class-classicist.

Followed a curious and inglorious scene,
When the egregious Ajax was confronted
With the papers and a Presbyterian dean,
Whose sense of humor had been sadly blunted.
The victim sobbed and gulped, and in between
Gazed on his persecutors with a hunted
Look. And his tone was tragic when he spake:
" I cribbed, I cribbed, but all for Conway's sake. "

So Swett was lost to Conway. And there grew
A rumor that an enemy of youth
Presided over Latin, one who slew
His thousands, and ten thousands without ruth.
And the tradition in a year or two
Took on the very lineaments of truth,
For then a portent in a Gambier game
Befell that is remembered yet with shame.

In the first half Conway snowed Gambier under.
The stands were rhythmic with the crackling cheer.
As the red-shirted louts began to thunder
On toward the final victory of the year,
Till the half ended, hapless chance and blunder
Cost the half-hearted foemen bitter dear.
In fact there never was a nambier pambier
Performance by a football team from Gambier.

Nineteen to nothing at the intermission
The score stood. When the interval was ended
With Gambier's host a fearful apparition
Into the white-barred field of war descended.
Swett in the pink and prime of hard condition
Towered 'mid the foemen, terrible and splendid.
And the hearts of Conway's thousands 'gan to quake
As they beheld the hairy traitor take

The kick-off. Ninety yards he ran it back.
They could not hold him with a barbed-wire fence.
Disabled champions wallowed in his track.
There were many nearly fatal accidents.
Till the last gun fired, without stint or slack,
He wrought a slaughter that was so immense
That Conway's sons, though wounded to the core,
Can somehow never recollect that score.

Five dreadful years that supermoron played
The man for Gambier. I think it was because
They gave him credit for studying the trade
Of blacksmith, and perhaps relaxed the laws
To let him through his course with passing grade.
So Conway men say, in whose heart yet gnaws
The bitter recollection of the years
Of subjugation. Then the picture clears.

Prescott had not perceived it was a time
Of tragedy. In the cottage by the glen
He had been happy weaving into rhyme
Ovid's remarks on Gods and things and men.
And rambler-roses had contrived to climb
Over his door. And grace was with him then,
And that which lifts a man out of the mob
Namely the fact that he adored his job.

In a world of mighty men he moved twice-born.
They made more fair for him the existing day.
He never felt amid the alien corn
As if they were two thousand years away.
For him they emptied an abundant horn,
And to his spirit nobly said their say
In glittering prose, or verse like breakers rolling,
The very essence of the soul controlling:

Horace, Catullus, whose ecstatic phrase
Burns on for ever in a generous brain,
And Juvenal, whose line like lightning plays,
Tined with a wrath that is not wholly sane,
Or he whom Dante did not dare to praise,
And who the Italian's praises might disdain,
Had the noblest nature that was ever born
Known the sublime infirmity of scorn.

Or the class-room hushed, as he discoursed of Homer,
Seeing in Ithaca the great bow bend,
Or the narrow galley ride the wine-dark comber,
And Achilles mourning for his fated friend.
For learning was to him not a misnomer
For deadly drudgery without an end,
A dull, interminable, unseemly traffic,
The robbery of graveyards paleographic.

Yet it hurt him, as he strove with dolts like Swett,
When for terrible split seconds he divined
That there was brightness they could never get
On the great page, beauty that strikes men blind
To small things. From that beauty as from a threat
They fled, preferring the moleskins of their kind,
And nourishing a quite unreasoning doubt
That dangerous learning yet might find them out.

Oh, strange dull human mind that dares not lift
Its glances to the firmament star-pattened,
That dodges grace and truth with clumsy shift,
Loving to batten where the swine have battened,
And hating movements is content to drift,
And whose obtuseness is yet further flattened
By contact with its neighbor's crudities.
If we must have brains, why have brains like these?

Prescott might give that up like you and me.
He even gave up being much annoyed
By the increasing imbecility
He saw in the undergraduate anthropoid,
Whose interest more and more had come to be
Centred in the autumnal ellipsoid.
I wrench that accent for the sake of rhyme.
Just so their brains were wrenched at big game time.

Well he should worry, in their phrase uncouth.
They would in time to come learn better things.
It is ungenerous to be hard on youth,
However hard youth be. Experience brings
Knowledge — perhaps — of beauty and of truth.
And if right learning could not lend them wings
To soar about the summits he adored,
It was much to him that he himself had soared.

So would he muse in evening's lucid calms
While through the shadows his wife's violin
Discovered inner melody of Brahms,
And music like a spirit hovered in
The twilight, scattering odorous musk and balms
For souls grown weary in that daily din,
Which, by a curious misappropriation
Of terms, goes by the name of education.

So would he muse, nor knew that those sad years
When Conway bore the burden and the heat
Were seminal time when various ideas
Occurred to Lush by now " upon the Street "
In far New York where he bit off the ears
Of several men who tried to corner wheat.
For quite a month the inner cereal group
Were much disturbed by the newcomer's " coup. "

At the next Commencement Lush was in his glory
As Conway's favored most successful son.
His classmates awestruck listened to the story
Of the appalling deeds that he had done.
It was no feeble and no transitory
Power that the young financial man had won,
As the white gymnasium rising by the side
Of the red brick old college testified.

That was symbolic. The white colonnade
Towered 'mid the maples spick and span and new,
And cast the library quite in the shade.
The chapel cheapened in the local view.
Lush in the choice of architect displayed
A good expensive taste, and gaily threw
A round half-million into the erection
Of a sublime Corinthian confection.

Nor was that all. The demi-god decreed
That Conway should no longer bow in shame
Before the cohorts Swett was wont to lead.
" You want, " he said, " a coach that knows the game,
" A hard-boiled egg of the true fighting breed. "
And from a played-out carriage-factory came
One who had made no millions, but whom fate
Determined that sports-writers should call great —

Even Anderson predestined to prevail,
The blond colossus with the one-track brain,
Who had failed in business, but who could not fail
Where footballs bounced on the resounding plain.
" Age could not wither him, nor custom stale
His infinite monotony. " Disdain
Of highbrows did not bother him at all,
As he taught Conway now to bear the ball.

That was Swett's sixth and last year. I am told
That he was in the Gambier art-school then,
But what the casts that he contrived to mould,
Or what the savage tracings of his pen
I know not. Came a shuddering dawn and cold,
And in the fell cirque raged the mighty men.
In vain the Gambier stands to Swett appealed.
Four henchmen bore him senseless from the field,

While up and down thundered the vast machine
That had overthrown him in his pride of power,
Scoring at will, and pimpled youths obscene
Shrieked like black buzzards in the bull's last hour.
The slate was unmistakably wiped clean.
The cream of Gambier's happiness went sour,
And coaches aped at Harvard and at Yale,
The play men called " Anderson's fairy-tale. "

So they put Conway on the map at last,
And her reputation — and enrolment — grew.
The college put away the mildewed past.
Prescott saw the faculty was changing too.
Strange men who looked like clergymen declassed
Garbled preposterous subjects queer and new.
They talked of moral values, uplift, and
The undergraduates ate out of their hand.

They were great on crowd-psychology. He heard
Them rant against the outworn shibboleth
Of classic culture. Half way it occurred
To him that all their talk was like the breath
Of adolescent petulance absurd.
Could men like this talk beauty's self to death?
He shuddered as he heard the wonted roar,
For beauty has been talked to death before

By Ostrogoths and Vandals and Hindoos,
By Spencer, and by Stanley Hall and Lotze,
By Christians and Mahometans and Jews
With educational theories hotsy-totsy,
And in particular by earnest views
Advanced by Herbart and by Pestalozzi,
Whose votaries, fired by fury pedagogic,
Break Priscian's head and disembowel logic.

He did not murmur. There were students still,
Though for the most part pale and washed-out things,
Who took his courses of their own free will,
And drank with him the Heliconian Springs,
Poor ugly girls all innocent of frill,
Whose intellects were generally in slings,
And invalid boys. As Swinburne says, " Apollo
" Is a very, very bitter god to follow. "

And at rare intervals, say a year or two,
Prescott would come on a superior mind.
And then his world would like a snake renew
Its glory, as bright youth began to find
The golden age again. It found it too.
He saw to that, though he was always kind
To his invalids, because he had learned how.
There was a trouble in his household now.

He scarce knew what. The sweet-strained violin
Discoursed the noble symphonies no more.
And various doctors striding out and in
Imparted to him portions of their lore.
His wife lay very quiet, pinched, and thin,
Seeming even lovelier than she was before,
And smiling in her sweet familiar fashion,
While something drained her forces like a passion.

It was relentless like those outer things,
Of which he had grown increasingly aware.
It stabbed at beauty with invisible stings.
It made a darkness in the noonday air.
Sleepless at night the overshadowing wings
Beat, and a dolorous presence seemed to stare
Out of the infinite at him. The doctors shrewd
Pooh-poohed his ignorant solicitude,

And talked a lot " of diet and X-rays
And the glorious gains of science. " They made tests
Innumerable and infinite delays.
There were consultations and professional jests.
And afterwards they went upon their ways,
Having, of course, their other interests,
Leaving Prescott agonized in the old groove
With Mrs. Prescott who did not improve.

Spring after spring brought the white dogwood flower.
The summer moonlight whitened the fair glen.
The scarlet autumn gloried in its hour,
And winter's winding-sheet was spread again.
Prescott abode a pawn within the power
Of obscure terror. The merry world of men
Was very far away from his reality
Where love was touching fingers with mortality.

Yet there was peace there and the sentiment
Of the imperishable. The grove of oak,
Opposite his window where the sweet stream went,
A solemn and eternal language spoke.
She lived. His moments gave him that content.
And when the glory of the red dawn broke
She smiled with him to see the scarlet fires
Behind the leafed trees or bare ruined choirs.

But in his trouble I forget my theme
And Lush, who was by this time a trustee
Of Conway, and whose brain conceived a scheme
Appealing to his idiosyncrasy.
He was the sort to realize a dream.
Quiet was a weird that Lush could never dree.
His mind made up was nickel and vanadium.
So Conway simply had to have that Stadium.

For men were building the whole country o'er
Huge structures whence to view the fighting grounds
Where the elevens battle to a score —
Things that one day when time has passed our bounds
And all our trust and travail are no more,
Will puzzle archaeologists, as Mounds
Perplex those gentry now where they exhume
Rose-pearls from a forgotten chieftain's tomb.

Almost I can foresee what they'll endite,
Their theories of the uses of those vast
Amphitheatrical ruins from the night
Of History. What guesses they will cast
Back at us, speculating on the rite
We celebrated in the abysmal past,
Inferring doubtless we were a cultured crew
Who built for all time better than we knew,

And worshipped sky-gods, pointing the long axis
Of each ellipse straight to the Northern Star.
They'll date us from the altered parallaxes
Of the Heavens in that epoch dim and far.
Our lives, our deaths, our loves, our income taxes,
They will evoke like Genii from the jar.
And they will link the builders of the stadium
With the culture epoch they'll call palaeo-radium,

While the very dust that shall o'ercome them drifts
Invincible over the concrete tiers,
And from the gap-toothed cracks the dogwood lifts
White boughs again in the girlhood of the years,
Or violets slip into their spring-shifts,
And the woodchuck in the thicket cocks his ears
Where once our scene played, being a cautious beast.
But I'm off my subject — ten thousand years at least.

Jack Lush begat it in the Alumni paper.
There were discussions full of verve and heat.
The undergraduate press began to vapor
As the undergraduate heart began to beat.
And every real estate man cut a caper
And picked a site upon his favorite street.
In the vast enthusiasm several factors
Entered — Portland cement men and contractors,

Who always had loved Conway from the heart.
The faculty, as usual behind
The spirit of the age, took little part
At first. But a professor of the kind
I erewhile mentioned, with consummate art,
The anachronistic dryasdusts aligned,
Who marched in the procession rub-a-dub,
With all the fervor of a rotary club.

Those were great days for Conway. Yet men speak
With awe of the tremendous drive Lush drave,
Tears in their voices, a flush upon the cheek,
Telling how the local undertakers gave
Ten thousand bucks, and for a dreadful week
The barbers charged two dollars for a shave,
Reserving for themselves two bits to fee 'em,
While the rest went to build the Coliseum.

In justice to Jack Lush, it should be stated
He gave an actual million to the cause,
And time, of course, which can't be estimated,
And perhaps took his payment in applause.
But his gift, as the press says, was predicated
On inconvenient economic laws.
And Conway had to raise Oh lor! Oh lor!
Unpauperized another million more.

Anyhow they raised it, and a hundred fights
Started at once. The local papers raged
Over the pros and cons of various sites,
Whose charms they urged with fury unassuaged.
On every side was talk of wrongs and rights.
And while the highest war the champions waged,
Jack Lush had bought, without their will or knowledge,
The perfect site, and given it to the college.

Prescott first heard of that munificence
One twilight, as the soft dark shadows fell,
And the evening-paper flew across the fence
That ran between his garden and the dell,
Where the stream babbled in sweet somnolence,
While the bees hummed in the roses he loved well.
Across the page the staring headlines spread.
Only half comprehendingly he read

The text that flanked the enormous half-tone cut
Of a structure, whose design was founded on
The vast curve of a giant cocoanut,
With features borrowed from the Parthenon
And later Renaissance suggestions — But
I won't go on with the comparison.
The thing that brought excitement to the height
Was the determination of the site,

Which, to be brief, was that same pleasant glen
Where hope and youth had been and were no more,
Where he took refuge from the world of men.
From his hand the paper fluttered to the floor.
That concrete horror swam into his ken.
Jack Lush! He thought how twenty years before
He had met Anderson and Lush returning
In the autumn twilight 'neath a wild sky burning.

And now — now — now — to violate the place,
Where if grief were, at least a dove-like peace
Had ever brooded. Blood rushed to his face.
On his mild forehead deepened a black crease.
That horrible hulk of concrete without grace,
That ghastly Gothic travesty on Greece!
He glared at the white architectural sketch,
Which would have made Carrere and Hastings retch.

And this would tramp his oak and dogwood down,
Pashing their life out with a brute's intents.
And he was helpless. He might rage and frown.
Would that chastise this shameful insolence?
That dolts might gambol to amuse the clown,
The beauty that had been his one defence
Must be stamped out, obliterated, raped
By the multitudinous, questionably shaped

Leviathan, polyp-minded, million-handed,
Ape-curious, heartless, careless, tasteless, aimless,
That wanted sport, and got what it commanded,
A vulgar Rome, inglorious, and nameless.
Oh for a Juvenal, ferocious, candid,
To pillory this crowd that laid its shameless
Tentacular fingers upon exquisite things.
Suddenly his hysteria took wings

And fled. It was, and it would have to be
Just as he was himself. So it was fated.
He carried to his wife her toast and tea,
And, while she supped, inly he cogitated
The consolations of philosophy
Against that ravaging vision unabated.
That night he dreamed that the Chimeras fell
From the Gorgons won the championship of Hell,

And were to play the Ghouls, West against East.
The gridiron was a lake of flaming ore.
The referee was the ten-headed beast,
The umpire the prodigious minotaur.
And the chimeric captain had released
His views on trying to keep down the score.
He thought the field was hardly fast enough
For the three-headed crowd to do their stuff.

Came the surveyors. Fell the dogwood-bough
With all its blanched petals 'neath the axe.
The new-leafed oak dropped headlong anyhow.
The caterpillar-truck's tremendous tracks
Obliterated age-old leaf-mould now.
The very stream its prattle must relax,
Silent and stifled in the darkling gripe
Of a sable subterranean sewer-pipe.

Steam-shovels hawked and snorted like asthmatic
Behemoths suffering from mal de mer.
At night they cast infernal shades erratic
Under the blue-barbed arc-light's hellish glare.
And foremen bellowed curses autocratic,
And dynamite exploded everywhere,
Till carpenters arrived in wasplike swarms,
Hammering like Maxims on the concrete forms.

Beauty and privacy and evening quiet
Vanished for ever 'neath the huge white ramp,
Whose bleak forerunners were mechanic riot
And the crash and roar of an artillery-camp.
And the doctor, cocking a perturbed eye at
The white-robed nurse with the chart beside the lamp,
Said bitterly to Prescott: " All this row
Isn't helping her. But we can't move her now. "

Still she survived. The infernal racket ended
In its due course, and a new siege began.
There was a dedication-function splendid,
And a crowd, which in the memory of man
Was not exceeded, at the cirque attended.
When the show was o'er, with one accord they ran
Through Prescott's little garden, tramping down
His flowers in their headlong rush to town.

Jack Lush beheld the pansies' immolation,
As from the stadium's vomiting gates he passed
And it gave him a dissatisfied sensation
He hardly knew of what. The popular blast
Blew by, and left its trail of desolation.
As Lush walked on, a backward look he cast.
He wrote next day to Prescott that no doubt

The college would be glad to buy him out
For solid shekels. And he himself would see
That trespasses should not occur again.
He was as good too as his guarantee.
Workmen arrived, and Prescott's small domain
Was girded with much barbed-wire tracery,
And furnished with a pad-lock and a chain.
And at the games policemen badged with brass
Kept yet more brazen hoodlums off the grass.

Yet Prescott was not satisfied. An end
Somehow he knew was coming. And he saw
How all things in that house began to tend
On to mortality — a descending awe.
The hard-boiled doctor gently as a friend
Addressed him. Prescott knew that not a straw
Of hope remained — but parting of the breath,
And in that house the privacy of death.

Three days that last fight lasted. On the third
The din of factory whistles blared at noon.
Far off on the November air he heard
Brass-bands that crashed out Conway's football tune.
Nearer they drew, and shouting vast and blurred
As of Riffians in Mountains of the Moon
Rose in a tumult and a yell confused.
America was going to be amused.

The crowd poured on. The doctor wrangled through
The close-locked ranks in his sputtering machine,
Tooting his horn above the hullabaloo.
He brought another measure of morphine,
Which helps us from the old sleep to the new
Whose meaning we divine not, if it mean
Or mean not. He filled the needle, while a vast
Silence possessed the adjacent mobs at last,

Followed by a yell as if of Hell broke loose,
As the doctor pressed the needle's piston down.
Prescott scarcely heard. His senses seemed obtuse.
The doctor cleansed the needle, with a frown.
The white nurse bit her lip. And like the deuce
Sounds like to air-raids in a populous town
Broke out once more with a catastrophic smash,
And the brass-bands clamored with a jazz-bang crash.

The mask-like face was flickerless. The room
Took on by turns appropriate quiet, or
Vibrated to the shattering siss-boom
Of Gambier and Conway's mimic war.
Bride-like his wife lay waiting for the groom,
And Prescott studied scratches on the floor
And fly-specks on the ceiling, Heaven and Hell
Behind them, while upswelled or sank the yell.

The minutes dragged their length away like slugs,
Leaving each its slime of agony behind.
A bar of sun-shine crawled across the rugs,
Where it had crept athwart a broken blind.
The table set with iridescent drugs
Gleamed brilliantly while Prescott sought to find
Lost consolations. In vain his bleak mind tossed
In that dim sea. They were consolations lost.

The shouts were growing as the ending came,
Mingled with song that choked the hateful sky.
Where once his oak-trees burgeoned, scarlet flame
Irradiated evening. Feet stormed by,
And Gambier shouted, issuing from the game
Shouldering victorious champions on high,
Cheer after cheer, louder and louder yet
Chanting the name invincible of Swett.

Poor Prescott caught one devastating glimpse,
As the infuriate doctor drew the shade,
Of a battalion of infernal imps
Marching along as if upon parade.
They bore a dozen adolescent simps
And one vast form, stoop-shouldered and decayed,
Swett, worthy father of a hopeless son,
Who had received the forward pass which won.

The wild roar did not slacken. Yet very still
The chamber grew, besieged by hateful noise.
They knew the invisible groom had had his will
The dust to which all golden girls and boys
And chimney-sweepers come, for good or ill
Lay without throb and done with all employs.
The doctor rose erect, pulled down his waistcoat,
And said: " I did my best. I'm sorry Prescott. "

They led him like an infant from the room.
The white nurse sneaked some whiskey in the tea
She brought him, as November's early gloom
Sank over all the landskip silently,
Till the full moon came issuing from the womb
Of darkness, like that brilliant agony
Rising within his spirit to effuse
All nature with intolerable hues.

He stepped outdoors. Gigantic, argentine,
And death-like glimmered the portentous wall,
A nightmare barrier, inimical, obscene,
'Neath which it was his destiny to crawl
Defeated, where his hope and trust had been,
Comfortless, desolate, degraded, small,
Broken, and impotent to resurrect
Poor beauty with mortality infect.