The Republican journal., 1912-02-15

They came, thronging and beloved band,
Charles Dickens when you raised your wizard
thousand and a half thousand more,
They came to wander on this earthly shore
Your folk called into Time from No. Mans
Land
Beings not high and lordly and far away,
But fashioned of the stuff of every day
whlmsey, motley race
Mixed of all the noble and the base
| OF seraph and of satyr, like the souls
That walk our world to their unreckoned goals.
You called them into life hurrying crowd;
Some came with natures knack
Of joy, tasting of life with pleasant smack
Some with their own wild shining bent and
bowed
Each with his own hell loaded on his back,
And some came bending under the worlds
wrong,
Rose up to smite for God the fatted greed
That grows and gorges on brothers need.
And some came young and innocent to move
Unframed among the dark and vile, to prove
How valiant and invulnerable is truth
How silver armored in immortal youth
Gently you lit US with the light of day
The unpublished virtues of the common way
Showed how the old humanities endure
Down in the hard-pressed coverts of the DOOR,
You were the friend of the rejected ones,
The witness for the humble, for the sons
OF misery forgotten in their tears,
And trampled by the hoof-be of the years.
You raised for human rights a world heard
&c ri,
Yet not with sword you came
To batter dow n the walls of sham and shame;
But with wind of laughter, warm and strong
You hurled away the props of ancient wrong
Your mimic world sweeps by upon its way,
A pageant on lighted stage rehearsed.
A curious host now grieving and now gay
Each in his little whirl of dust immersed
Each caught into his ring of circumstance
Some moved by law, others by whimsey chance.
Tragic. heroic, wise, grotesque, absurd,
They came and vanished at your sovereign
word;
All foolish and fantastical as we
Appear perhaps to angels as they see
Our crooked gait and gesture and grimace,
AS We plunge on into the heated race,
Forgetting stars for pebbles of no worth
Forgetting, too, our high immortal BIRTH
Wizard, you sent from your creative hand
Strange shapes to walk and peer in life's old
land
Shapes kin to those We jostle in the street.
| Shapes friendly as the forms we daily greet;
They live and move among US as a part
OF all that share the memories of the heart.
F, And some of all their sorrow and their mirth
Will stay to cheer and chasten the old earth
AS long there any mortal tears
In men. or any laughter down the years.
And SO Shakespeare looks back and smiles to see
Pickwick and Falstaff in one FOSTERING glee,
Immortal now, beyon Times hurt or harm,
Going down the world together. arm in arm;
| Where Little Nell and sweet Miranda go
Straying green fields with April flowers ALLOW;
Where Mistress Quickly by the evening lamp
Sits nodding and babbling on with Sairey Camp;
Where dwarfed Dan Qulp and squatted Cali
ban
Warped efigies of man
| Wrestle in wolfsh hug,
Snarling and grinning in savage tug.
And SO, Charles Dickens, whatsoeer betide.
You have the masters smile; be satisfied.
| Fare gladly on, content where'er you are
Doing your happy work in any star;
Shakespeare looks back and thinks the look
| worth while;
Be satisfied, for you have won his smile!
When Kate Douglas Wiggin had fin
ished the story she had to tell, and the
diners had clapped till they were weary,
they knew why it would never have done
to have her name on the list of speakers
and saw more clearly just why when she
spoke at the Arnold Bennett dinner there
was the suspicion of a sting in her trib-
ute to the guest of honor. who had said
harsh things OF Charles Dickens. For
Kate Douglas Wiggin is of the ardent
Dickens lovers, and she frankly con-
fessed that sometimes in the sunlight of
her idol the other writer's, those "more
| fawless" Victorians, seemed 'slittle
faded"
For the little girl who journeyed with
Dickens was Kate Douglas Wiggin her
self in pinafore-a little slip of girl,
heart-sick at not having been taken with
the older folk to hear him read at Port
land, Me-, and filled with a reverent awe
when she found herself on the same
train the next day with this man who
had written the books that were part of
her very existence. She said she never
knew how she did it, but, as though
drawn, she slipped away from her mother
and found a seat in the same coach with
Dickens, and then, when the seat next
him was vacated for a moment, she
pumped into it. There she sat, with
her heart in her mouth, but glad for all
that her bonnet was tied on with bright
new ribbons of blue. For time did
not notice her, and then, as he turned
from the window, she heard his surprised
tones:
God bless my soul, how did you come
here?"
Then it all came out, how much she
would have cared to have heard him read
the night before, how she had read and
read all his books, except the missing
one that her mother was to buy that day
in Boston.
.'And have you really read those long,
thick books?" Charles Dickens asked,
his eyes wide as he looked at the wisp of
an enthusiast beside him. Some of them
three and some four times, she eagerly
volunteered, but then, goaded by her
New England conscience, she added that