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"My huntsman, Rody, blow the horn,

And make the hills reply."

"I cannot blow upon my horn,

I can but weep and sigh."

On the sun-smitten grass;

One blind hound only lies apart

He holds deep commune with his heart: The moments pass and pass;

The servants round his cushioned place The blind hound with a mournful din

Are with new sorrow wrung;

And hounds are gazing on his face, Both aged hounds and young.

Lifts slow his wintry head;

The servants bear the body in;

40

The hounds wail for the dead.

THE CONTEMPORARY ESSAY

The essay today is the product of all previous varieties of the type in English literature. Each of its important kinds has been fully illustrated in this volume: the moral and didactic essay of Bacon, presenting compact observations on topics which it is interesting to speculate upon, the periodical essay of Addison and Steele in which the scope is extended to include descriptive sketches of men and manners, narrative episodes in which a thoughtful, or amusing, or satirical quality is present, and discussions of many matters; the formal essay in which literary, historical, scientific, and social questions are treated with stylistic finish, as in the examples from Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and Pater; and the familiar essay of Charles Lamb and many others in which the author converses pleasantly at his ease with the reader in a very intimate and personal way. The essay as found in contemporary literature may be any of these things, or various combinations of them.

W. H. Hudson was a naturalist and one of the greatest of recent essayists. "How I Became An Idler," from Idle Days in Patagonia, illustrates the out-of-door essay at its best. John Galsworthy is best known as a playwright and novelist. With a singularly judicial attitude he attacks class prejudice and the stupidity of struggles between labor and capital. He is ever the reformer. His essay called "A Commentary" is naturally cast in narrative and conversational form. Max Beerbohm is a writer with a subtle humor and a gift of caricature. The essay here printed. is an amusing imitation of one of his contemporaries. G. K. Chesterton is characterized by a journalistic style and a love of paradox. He has genuine critical power. The discussion of Martin Chuzzlewit is a very interesting comment by one whom a certain community of spirit renders especially fitted to interpret Dickens. Lord Dunsany is the author of plays and sketches full of Celtic fancy and strange power. The essays included here are brief but vivid pictures of war at the front. W. H. Tomlinson passed from reporter to war correspondent to member of the editorial board of the London Nation. The Sea and the Jungle, a narrative of a South American voyage; Old Junk, a collection of essays on miscellaneous subjects; and London River, a series of essays on scenes and characters along the water-front, are his most important volumes. They reveal a distinctive note in English prose style.

It would be possible to adopt a more rigorous definition of the essay which would exclude one or more of the pieces named, but it seemed better and more in accord with present tendencies to indicate by the diversity of the following specimens the wide range and varied form of the essay of today.

W. H. HUDSON (1842-1923)

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER

If things had gone well with me, if I had spent my twelve months on the Rio Negro, as I had meant to do, watching and listening to the birds of that district, these desultory chapters, which might be described as a record of what I did not do, would never have been written. For I should have been wholly occupied with my special task, moving in a groove too full of delights to allow of its being left, even for an occasional run and taste of liberty; and seeing one class of objects too well would have made all others look distant, obscure, and of little interest. But it was not to be as I had planned it. An accident, to be described by-and-by, disabled me for a period, and the winged people could no longer be followed with secret steps to their haunts, and their actions watched through a leafy screen. Lying helpless on my back through the long sultry midsummer days, with the white-washed walls of my room for landscape and horizon, and a score or two of buzzing house-flies, perpetually engaged in their intricate airy dance, for only company, I was forced to think on a great variety of subjects, and to occupy my mind with other problems than that of migration. These other problems, too, were in many ways like the flies that shared my apartment, and yet always remained strangers to me, as I to them, since between their minds and mine a great gulf was fixed. Small unpainful riddles of the earth; flitting, sylph-like things, that began life as abstractions, and developed, like imago from maggot, into entities: I always flitting among them, as they performed their mazy dance, whirling in circles, falling and rising, poised motionless, then suddenly cannoning against me for an instant, mocking

my power to grasp them, and darting off again at a tangent. Baffled I would drop out of the game, like a tired fly that goes back to his perch, but like the resting, restive fly I would soon turn towards them again; perhaps to see them all wheeling in a closer order, describing new fantastic figures, with swifter motions, their forms turned to thin black lines, crossing and recrossing in every direction, as if they had all combined to write a series of strange characters in the air, all forming a strange sentence-the secret of secrets! Happily for the progress of knowledge only a very few of these fascinating elusive insects of the brain can appear before us at the same time: as a rule we fix our attention on a single individual, like a falcon amid a flight of pigeons or a countless army of small field finches; or a dragon-fly in the thick of a cloud of mosquitoes, or infinitesimal sandflies. Hawk and dragon-fly would starve if they tried to capture, or even regarded, more than one at a time.

I caught nothing, and found out nothing; nevertheless, these days of enforced idleness were not unhappy. And after leaving my room, hobbling round with the aid of a stout stick, and sitting in houses, I consorted with men and women, and listened day by day to the story of their small un-avian affairs, until it began to interest me. But not too keenly. I could always quit them without regret to lie on the greensward, to gaze up into the trees or the blue sky, and speculate on all imaginable things. The result was that when no longer any excuse for inaction existed use had bred a habit in me-the habit of indolence, which was quite common among the people of Patagonia, and appeared to suit the genial climate; and this habit and temper of mind I retained. with occasional slight relapses, during the whole period of my stay.

Our waking life is sometimes like a

dream, which proceeds logically enough until the stimulus of some new sensation, from without or within, throws it into temporary confusion, or suspends its action; after which it goes on again, but with fresh characters, passions, and motives, and a changed argument.

After feasting on cherries, and resting at the estancia, or farm, where we first touched the shore, we went on to the small town of El Carmen, which has existed since the last century, and is built on the side of a hill, or bluff, facing the river. On the opposite shore, where there is no cliff nor high bank, and the low level green valley extends back four or five miles to the gray barren uplands, there is another small town called La Merced. In these two settlements I spent about a fortnight, and then, in company with a young Englishman, who had been one or two years in the colony, I started for an eighty miles' ride up the river. Half way to our destination we put up at a small log hut, which my companion had himself built a year before; but finding, too late, that the ground would produce nothing, he had lately abandoned it, leaving his tools and other belongings locked up in the place.

A curious home and repository was this same little rude cabin. The interior was just roomy enough to enable a man of my height (six feet) to stand upright and swing a cat in without knocking out its brains against the upright rough-barked willow-posts that made the walls. Yet within this limited space was gathered a store of weapons, tackle, and tools, sufficient to have enabled a small colony of men to fight the wilderness and found a city of the future. My friend had an ingenious mind and an amateur's knowledge of a variety of handicrafts. The way to make him happy was to tell him that you had injured something made of iron or

brass-a gun-lock, watch, or anything complicated. His eyes would shine, he would rub his hands and be all eagerness to get at the new patient to try his surgical skill on him. Now he had to give two or three days to all these wood and metal friends of his, to give a fresh edge to his chisels, and play the dentist to his saws; to spread them all out and count and stroke them lovingly, as a breeder pats his beasties, and feed and anoint them with oil to make them shine and look glad. This was preliminary to the packing for transportation, which was also a rather slow process.

Leaving my friend at his delightful task I rambled about the neighborhood taking stock of the birds. It was a dreary and desolate spot, with a few old gaunt and half-dead red willows for only trees. The reeds and rushes standing in the black stagnant pools were yellow and dead; and dead also were the tussocks of coarse tow-colored grass, while the soil beneath was white as ashes and cracked everywhere with the hot suns and long drought. Only the river close by was always cool and green and beautiful.

At length, one hot afternoon, we were sitting on our rugs on the clay floor of the hut, talking of our journey on the morrow, and of the better fare and other delights we should find at the end of the day at the house of an English settler we were going to visit. While talking I took up his revolver to examine it for the first time, and he had just begun to tell me that it was a revolver with a peculiar character of its own, and with idiosyncrasies, one of which was that the slightest touch, or even vibration of the air, would cause it to go off when on the cock-he was just telling me this, when off it went with a terrible bang and sent a conical bullet into my left knee, an inch or so beneath the knee-cap. The pain was not much, the sensation resembling that

caused by a smart blow on the knee; but on attempting to get up I fell back. I could not stand. Then the blood began to flow in a thin but continuous stream from the round symmetrical bore which seemed to go straight into the bone of the joint, and nothing that we could do would serve to stop it. Here we were in a pretty fix! Thirty-six miles from the settlement, and with no conveyance that my friend could think of except a cart at a house several miles up the river, but on the wrong side! He, however, in his anxiety to do something, imagined, or hoped, that by some means the cart might be got over the river, and so, after thoughtfully putting a can of water by my side, he left me lying on my saddlerugs, and, after fastening the door on the outside to prevent the intrusion of unwelcome prowlers, he mounted his horse and rode away. He had promised that, with or without some wheeled thing, he would be back not long after dark. But he did not return all night; he had found a boat and boatman to transport him to the other side only to learn that his plan was impracticable, and then returning with the disappointing tidings, found no boat to recross, and so in the end was obliged to tie his horse to a bush and lie down to wait for morning.

For me night came only too soon. I had no candle, and the closed, windowless cabin was intensely dark. My wounded leg had become inflamed and pained a great deal, but the bleeding continued until the handkerchiefs we had bound round it were saturated. I was fully dressed, and as the night grew chilly I pulled my big cloth poncho, that had a soft fluffy lining, over me for warmth. I soon gave up expecting my friend, and knew that there would be no relief until morning. But I could neither doze nor think, and could only listen. From my experience during those black anxious

hours I can imagine how much the sense of hearing must be to the blind and to animals that exist in dark caves. At length, about midnight, I was startled by a slight curious sound in the intense silence and darkness. It was in the cabin and close to me. I thought at first it was like the sound made by a rope drawn slowly over the clay floor. I lighted a wax match, but the sound had ceased, and I saw nothing. After awhile I heard it again, but it now seemed to be out of doors and going round the hut, and I paid little attention to it. It soon ceased, and I heard it no more. So silent and dark was it thereafter that the hut I reposed in might have been a roomy coffin in which I had been buried a hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth. Yet I was no longer alone, if I had only known it, but had now a messmate and bedfellow who had subtly crept in to share the warmth of the cloak and of my person-one with a broad arrow-shaped head, set with round lidless eyes like polished yellow pebbles, and a long smooth. limbless body, strangely segmented and vaguely written all over with mystic characters in some dusky tint on an indeterminate grayish-tawny ground.

At length, about half-past three to four o'clock, a most welcome sound was heard -the familiar twittering of a pair of scissor-tail tyrant birds from a neighboring willow-tree; and after an interval, the dreamy, softly rising and falling. throaty warblings of the white-rumped swallow. A loved and beautiful bird is this, that utters his early song circling round and round in the dusky air, when the stars begin to pale; and his song, perhaps, seems sweeter than all others, because it corresponds in time to that rise in the temperature and swifter flow of the blood-the inward resurrection experienced on each morning of our individual life. Next in order the red-billed finches

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