Arizona republican., 1891-11-24

says that on that side of the Atlantic still finger veterans who in poetic power are the compeers of Lowell. He adds this, however, But neither on one side of the Atlantic nor on the other is there any poet left whose verse isinstinct with SO much inspiration, or one who has in him so much of the seer of these latter days"
 What this inspiration was to his own life, Stead tells us. He writes, "This article is simply the fervent outpouring of the gratitude of one among the thou sands whom he has helped" Stead was only fifteen when he first felt the inspi- ration of Lowells word. Lowell's pref ace to "The Pious Editors Creed" helped Stead to determine his occupa- ton in life, he believes, Three or four years later he happened on Q volume of Lowel's poems. Stead was then threat ened with blindness. He was obliged to give up all serious study, and life looked dark indeed to him. Among the poems in the volume was that entitled Extreme Unction," and now when the distinguished journalist goes back to the book which so filled his boyish dreams he finds line drawn in pencil around Extreme Unction" and the words written, "This poem shaped my life" A dying man says to the holy man who would shrive him:
 Col leave me, Priest; my soul would be,
 Alone with the consoler, Death;
 For sadder eyes than thine will sec
 This crumbling clay yield up its breath;
 These shrivelod hands have deeper stains Than holy oil can cleanse away,
 Hands that havo plucked the worlds
 coarse gains
 As erst they plucked the flowers of May.
 Thero my dead Youth does wiring its hands,
 And there, with eyes that goad me yet,
 The ghost of my Ideal stands!
 Stead was at the most impressionable time of his life, The poem filled him with horror, this youth of eighteen, at the thought that hitherto he had lived for himself alone, and for the working out of his own ambitious day dreams. The mental process through which he passed with luis enfeebled health and failing eyesight was not unlike that de- scribed by religious persons as conyio- tion of sin and conversion. Mir. Stead writes of it:
 At the same timO this remorseful horror would sometimes abate somewhat, probably owing to occasional better health and then an immense inspiration thrilledme from the lines:
 On this bowed head the awful Past
 Once laid its consecrating hands
 The Future in ita purpose vast
 Paused, waiting my supreme commands. If recovered and my eyesight did not fail, perhaps after all, might yet live to better pur- pose. To what purpose? The answer came in the next verse:
 God bends from out the deep and says,
 Il gave thee the great gift of life;
 Vast thou not called in many ways?
 Are not my heaven and earth at strife?" The idea that everything wrong in tho world was a divine call to use your life in fighting it sank deep into my soul. And there, in the darkness and the gloom of that time of weak ness and trial, put away from me, as of the evil one, all dreams of fame and the literary ambitions on which had fed my boyhood. and resolutey set mytclf there and then to do what little l could, where l was, among those who surrounded me, to fulall "the trust for such high uses given" It was one of the de- cisiye moments in my life. Since then l can honestly say that l have never regarded liter erary or journalistic success as worth e straw, excepting in SC far as it enabled me to strike 6 heavier blow ia the cause of those for whom was called 10 fight