Winter Solstice 2020

We feared that this might be
our longest sleepless night. We feared to see
the Lightning-Bearer and the Crow —
to feel flames feed on our old failing, oaken strength —
to hear the haunting laugh at our unsilent
blight of madness in a Mammon-blasted land.

Why not just call them Kings, come from afar,
these Two? The Old, the New.
The Two have reconciled themselves to meeting
after centuries of wheeling down
the lines of distant spheres — have reconciled themselves
to putting past the memory, the blame,
if but for one brief Earthly day:

For one was Lord, once, and, asleep, castrated
by the second one, his own goat-suckled Son.
Old Jupiter and Saturn.
Older Zeus and Cronus.

Fire-blistered stands the oak, and severed
falls the mistletoe. The oldest Crow
of all of last year calls
to be reborn the Crow of all of next.

Conjunction, as they call it.
Just to human eyes, we know. Alignment,
glimpsed at gloaming from a waning world defiled
by her own troubled child.

How small, our traveled spheres! And yet they touch
the one upon the other. And they stretch
as far as sight may reach —
not that our eyes see light afar, this night.
The clouds, here, close off every King and sphere and star
despite our knowing just how long they planned
on meeting right there where they are.

We feared that this might be
a night immersed in deeper woe than what is here,
this windy, starless solstice night.
We must not rest, and yet it is that all the same
we know that we must sleep to dream ourselves
from where we were to what must be —
from here to farther where conjoining spheres
hold our enclosing but expanding ways,
our circle-tracing and yet interweaving days.

The oldest Crow of all: we never see
but only hear her. Over years
she calls, to this small night of ours —
then leaves us to our joys, and to our fears.

IMPOTUS

Illegally Malingering . . .

Cheers . . .

A Poem for November Third: Planting Garlic

One never knows quite when. November third,
this time. Forking and rooting one long patch,
white hands belie heart's warming, while they scratch
at living for its clove of grace. I heard

a bitter night comes, soon. So — now to grope
in stiff, chill soil, against the stillness near,
or never. Apple leaves cling late, this year —
dusk-green, blight-mottled, holding dear to hope:

small ears, curled, cupped to hear the Delphic lyre
one last time, before falling off — to sleep
down on this narrow bed, perhaps, with sheep
snow-wool pulled high. Nearby I nurse a fire
of twigs. Hands warmed, I plant, then — and I keep
ears cupped, for dying fall. Flames, too, expire.

November Third: On the sonnet "Planting Garlic"

I usually prefer not to add notes to a poem, but also usually prefer not to place a poem onto my blog — unless it seems of the moment, particularly the ever-so-quickly changing political moment.

I placed my sonnet "The Winter King" here due to Forty-Five's blusterous insanity about building walls, which I thought might abruptly land him in an asylum. So I rushed it, a bit: the poem appeared on this blog, in consequence, in a version not-quite final. A few words in it remained restless, and changed themselves soon enough. As it turned out, I would have had time aplenty to collect rejections for the effort. Forty-Five, who here in my blog writings runs rampage also as Koom-Posh, hid behind presidential immunity, and successfully maintained the Gipper tradition of mentally incapacitated rule.

The poem I will post after posting this note, however, I am not rushing onto this blog. I wrote its first draft very nearly a year ago. It won its place in my morning recitations to myself, so that I reexamined it daily through the year. (Is "morning recitations to myself" at all unclear? Its nature is simple: I recite poems to myself while making breakfast, feeding birds, or gardening.) Several times, during this, I told myself that the sonnet had reached finality. A restlessness in the words would soon again reappear, however. Then, in recent weeks, in October, the words found their way to a resting place.

The sonnet had seemed odd to me, in one aspect — which I left alone, even so — for its mentioning a specific date. November third was the day last year when, at the last possible opportunity, I was planting garlic. That the date made its way into the poem was an accident of the moment. But throughout the following year I knew, thanks to this accident, the exact date when I had been out in the cold, aware of the oncoming deep freeze while also beset by the discomforting feelings of mortality that had been mine since sometime midsummer.

An autumnal pall of uncertainty had fallen over me, well before the season arrived.

By the time the poem came to its resting state in October, of course, the air here in the States blew thickly with thoughts, admonishments, incantations, and dreads concerning November third.

Until the poem was at rest I saw this as mere coincidence. After the words settled, I saw it still as a coincidence.

But as a meaningful one.

The autumnal pall of uncertainty is here, upon all the land — as it has been for nearly four years. The Winter King arrived in 2016, even though the true winter of his soul will not fully enwrap our world until, or unless, he is given chance to unfold it.

But it is cold, now. We need a fire of twigs to warm our hands.

The only possible place where I might put out my offering, my little twig, in time to meet the moment which is upon us, is on my blog.

However few my readers may be, here, they are ones whom I know to be able to place their humanity near just such a twig, to access such warmth as may be there.

May all fully and truly human beings in this country find their own inner self-assurance, as well as their reassurance, by November third.

Cheers . . .

Toys in the Age of Wonder

My new book has been published.

I am here announcing it . . . about a month late. Am I laggard in my affections? (Where in the world does that line come from?) Actually, I rather like this book. I have lived with it for ten years, and have struggled over its myriad subjects, facts, and ideas for many more. It has its flaws, but sits all the same among my most important efforts, in the arts.

Toys in the Age of Wonder: Science Fiction, Society, and the Symbolism of Play brings together many things. My personally favored title, Wonder Tales, Toys, and the World that Swallowed Itself, I believe does convey some of the book's breadth. In it, I am talking much less about science fiction than the wonder tale; I am thinking about toys whether they were dimestore baubles or Emerson's "toys that infatuate men and which they play for;" and I am exploring the West's efforts to technically envelope the human sphere — a "consolidated civilization scheme," as I recall a character saying, in one story I discuss. I speak about toy history, history of science, novels, poetry, comic strips, lexical changes, and cultural changes. I draw in works by Poe and Verne, in particular, and by many other authors along the way — with "the way" moving mainly along a time-line from 1859 to 1957-8. My method is cultural criticism, on model of Lewis Mumford, with further guidance taken from the writings of Northrup Frye and Van Wyck Brooks — among, again, many others.

The book's illustrations, all in black and white, make it other than the glossy and colorful affairs which some among my earlier ones were. The items pictured, however, show what sorts of things fascinate me: illustrations from both children's and older-reader books; photographs of children with toys; catalog pages; postcards; World's Fair images and memorabilia; and the toys themselves, children's and adult — anything, in other words, that conveys the symbolic reality that prevails, to my point of view, over the concrete, in culture.

I should note that my announcement's delay comes from concern and circumstance. I did and do wonder: should I, indeed, make a quiet noise about this, and act as though the book's publication might rank in any way against the troubles of our time — the pandemic, the criminal political "leadership," the bought-and-sold legislatures, the bestial police actions, the wildfires, the extinctions, the dying of the only economy that truly matters, which is the economy of life on Earth?

The book does rank, in a way, and not only because it happened to become a fact in this particular time. It ranks, in its small way, because, for the patient few who read it, it will help elucidate how it is that we placed ourselves into these times which encompass our lives. Moreover, it discusses the process by which our present conditions came into being.

A circumstance working into this announcement's delay came about from my having an "outdated" computer system which my blog's host decided to stop recognizing or allowing, a few months ago. Having limited means, limited technical savvy, and a will-to-succeed that often ends up absorbed in soup-makings, dishwater, and garden dirt, it took me quite a while to reach that point in which I could not only pencil these words but also publish them electronically here.

My sympathy for those poorer than I am has grown quite keen. So much activity has shifted on-line during the pandemic that ever more individuals are, literally, being virtually excluded from society. While a part of society is reflected off and conducted by the shell of satellites circling Earth, another part goes unreflected.

Now myself enabled, until that point when I am granted obsolescence once again by our technological shell, I propose to make some quiet noise in relation to my book — with the hope that people will understand that if I make myself a nuisance — oh, if only! — I do so not to advance my fortunes, which will grow by little more than nothing from this effort, but to advance my society's, in however microscopic a manner.

Cheers . . .

P.S. The book has a higher price-tag than I might wish. When your nearest library reopens, please make a request for it.

With the Retardican Party

The Dissociated Press sent me to test the waters at the rally last night for President Koom-Posh, former child-star of the popular Mr. Brain TV show. Allow me to share a few impressions from the event, held at a local airfield.

Hovercraft were circling, dropping confetti and Anti-Responsibility, or Antiree, propaganda thickly everywhere. The concerns of the Antiree movement are so small that they fit on tiny, nearly dust-sized pieces of paper. Numerous older folk who had been brought to the rally by Retardican organizers were choking and reeling over, hacking and feebly begging for handkerchiefs. One sufferer told me that the shuttlebus driver had taken away his mask, because of the cameras. Coverage needed to show Retardican unity, the driver said.

I was wearing my mask, of course. It was my own news coverage, I suppose. I feared it would do me little good, though, given the shouting and screaming around me from those who seemed able to breathe and exhale clouds of Antiree propaganda without distress. When President Koom-Posh appeared, he arrived surrounded by the device Retardican leaders have been using lately. It seems perfectly transparent and efficacious, at least when used among fellow Retardicans. These "Bubbles of Delusion," produced by Devotion Under Infidelity, or DUI, an agency run by the President's uncle's wealthiest nephew, have become synonymous with the President's claim to have won the last election, and to have already won the next one.

A great hoorah following Koom-Posh's revelation that an adulatory mirror had told him he looked extremely handsome that morning. Then he excoriated his opponents for their socialism. "They say I have no plan for my second term but I have one," he said, inserting his trademark screech of understatement. "I will end socialism. I have already knocked over environmental barriers to business and industry because the national parks and wilderness areas, even our very land and water and air, are infected with public ownership! Now I will lay low not only Social Security — you see how cleverly they slipped 'Social' into its name? — but also the U.S. military, which is socialistically owned by the state; the VA hospitals, which are socialized medicine; the police, a socialized security force that must become even more anti-social; and the highways, those socialized routes for travel that insidiously have spread everywhere! Who needs them when I can fly here to see you in Air Force One, which is socialized air transport for my use only and which I personally will privatize!"

During the roar of approval I turned to a nearby woman with a small hat-size and enormous chest who was breathing rapidly.

"I thought last time," I said, "that he accused the opposition of wanting to eliminate the police."

"This isn't eliminating! He will make them all private Homely Securitoids!"

"Make them — what?"

"You aren't a believer, are you?"

"Oh, I suspect Koom-Posh has dug himself a deep enough hole."

"Just you wait! He'll dig himself deeper!"

On stage, Koom-Posh accused the Media of counting how many people were being hospitalized with breathing problems, not to mention Covid, after his rallies. "The Media are creating the situation and need to stop the counting!"

I turned to my companion again.

"He may get his wish. The Media will stop counting votes for him."

"That won't matter!"

"It won't?"

"No! He is above that!"

"He is?"

"Yes! Counting applies to everyone else! But he doesn't count!"

"President Koom-Posh — "

"President Koom-Posh doesn't have to count! So he doesn't count! He doesn't count!"

So loudly vociferous was she that others around her took it up. Soon the area was roaring, as well as wheezing, the chant of President Koom-Posh's not counting.

"Am I not counting on you?" came the responding roar from the stage.

"We don't count! We don't count!" roared back the crowd.

The time had come to leave, I thought. My ears were ringing with emanations from Koom-over's Bubble of Delusion and the none-too-tuneful ululations and chantings thickly swirling about me. The police at the edge, however, were letting no one leave early, unless on a gurney. Someone bumped me from behind. Turning to find a policeman there, I felt my mask being ripped away. A baton propelled me headfirst back into the crowd. I gasped, took in a dusty lungful, and passed out.

The next morning — apparently, since the sky was bright with sunshine — I woke groggily to a piercing headache. I held my hands before my eyes, and saw they were chalk-white.

I had frozen to death!

My hands shook so violently with fear at this insane thought that the thick Antiree dusting fell away. The stuff had nearly persuaded me. I stood up, coughing, and looked around at the field covered with corpses — or whatever they were, abandoned on the runway tarmac and surrounding grass. They looked like those ash-covered bodies at Pompeii.

I went to the cordon at the field's edge, still manned by police.

"Why is this fence here?" I said.

"To keep the Media from counting you all in there," said a policewoman.

"But I'm not one of them. I'm not dead."

She squinted at me. I half expected her to ask about my being a believer or not. Then she opened the gate.

"I guess you don't count," she said.

I believe she meant it as a compliment.

An Open Letter to Senator Ron Johnson

To Ron Johnson, Senator from Wisconsin:

Only four years ago, you thought it fitting for a Supreme Court nomination to be postponed or negated, because it fell "only eight months before an election where the American people are going to decide the direction of the country."

You were lying — perhaps to yourself, but more certainly to the public. You were lying, that is, unless you are a weasel now. Conceivably you are liar and weasel both, since you have accommodated yourself so well to the needs of Forty-Five, the devil whose name had best go unmentioned, who has proven himself so adept at being, at one and the same time, a liar and a weasel.

If you are either or both of these things, you do not represent me, a Wisconsinite and a supposed "constituent" of yours. Wisconsin has its share of liars and two-legged weasels, admittedly; and perhaps you have an obligation to do your honorable best by them.

Many voters here seem unperturbed at your having been put into office by offensively wealthy men; at your being a toady to a bigot who boasts of offensive wealth but who opens a wallet thick only with bluster and bilgewater; or at your helping oversee the violent violation of the rights of innocents through "Homeland" heavy-handedness. You shame Wisconsin, which suggests that your supporters, too, feel no shame.

Yet now in October — only weeks before the Russian government will attempt again to decide the direction of this country — you reveal yourself as a weasel, to all. I hope that your supporters see this through your Badger disguise, and feel pride enough in the fact that they are Badgers themselves to speak out and make you realize that your blush of success in a realm awash in bluster and bilgewater is, instead, the fever-bloom of falsehood — and, I do believe, of your poverty of integrity, and of your deep-seated guilt for doing wrong against your own state and nation.

Most sincerely not yours, Mark Rich, Cashton, Wisconsin

Exit Bloom, Enter Bloom

[Written March third, this year.]

For days, in the mornings when studying Emerson, I looked at the last blooms on the Christmas cactus, and yearned to have pencil and paper at hand to draw what I saw — the fragile, warm-toned, and drooping bloom seen only partially, through the fern that sits nearer at hand — through its dark stems, its leaves capturing in green the northern window's morning light.

And now I see only the spent blossom — still, it is true, fragile, warm-toned, and drooping — there, barely, through rising stems and spreading leaves.

And now, too, with the cactus done, the begonia on the same table blooms.

Thoughts for Youth in a Troubling Time

A few days back, on the 23rd, I was remembering an incident recounted by a friend. She was replying to someone else's comments on Facebook. Misha, a friend in mundane life as well as in this electronic realm, related the behavior of a teenaged group she meets on a street. The youths disregard prevailing thoughts about the necessity for social distancing, and show in their actions a disrespect for their elders.

This occurs in a political environment in which some people, even some who call themselves "lawmakers," express a willingness to threaten and dispense with the older members of society, in order to let the economy function. An economy that functions on the death of the knowledgeable and experienced is an economy to let founder and die, to my mind. But I suppose that those who profess this willingness are Morlocks, who have no taste for the old, and would rather have the young at hand.

Misha perceived in these youths' actions and attitudes their resentment toward her being older, which makes her symbolically the source of all that is troubling their young minds.

On the 23rd, sitting in a rocking chair even older than I am, I found myself penciling thoughts that I might say to these youth. So I place them here. For who knows? One or two, out of any group of twenty or so resentful youths, might listen. So:

Thoughts for Youth in a Troubling Time

If you listen to your peers, weigh carefully what they say.

Sometimes if you follow the group lead, and then go into error or worse, it feels less bad a thing than when you make a mistake through your own thought, trusting to your own instincts as to what is right to do, or good to do. Yet however soothed you may feel in being able to say that it was someone else's fault that you acted the fool, you feel this way because you have a callous over a callous. For you have wounded yourself doubly.

If you act against what is right and good, that is one self-inflicted wound. If you do so to follow someone's exhortation, or due to group pressure, then you are listening to them, and not to your own inner voice. And that wound — of ignoring yourself — is the most grievous of wounds. People go scarred and lamed through all their lives because of it, and never know. They think that the smile they see in the mirror is a true one. Since no one has hurt them but themselves, they think themselves unhurt.

If you say to us who are older that you deserve your folly, because you are only young once and must have your day, then give an ear to what those who are older can tell you. Youth is the making of mistakes. We find our way through life by wrong turns. If we recognize them as such, we go on to be older in years, and perhaps wiser. Otherwise we go on to be older in years, but with our committed foolishness compounded with illusion.

Most of us mix the two approaches.

Besides this, I say that you need not fret yourself over being young only once. If you heed your inner voice, and view life as a process of continually making yourself anew, you will find yourself able to make mistake after mistake after mistake, no matter your years, few or many. For you never cease finding your way. And if you live in this manner to your dying day then your "being young only once" has lasted all your life.

We are young forever, so long as we make only our own mistakes, and steer clear of the mistakes that others would have us make. Though not easy — nothing about youth is easy — this is what life offers to you. It offers it to you, as an individual, alone.

Cheers . . .

Masks for All in General

Science-fiction readers among you may have had a scene from a novel coming to your mind, lately. It has been to mine.

It must have been more than two decades ago that I read the Lisa Goldstein novel having this closing scene:

The tyrant who has persecuted mask-wearers finds one of their masks in his hands.

He tries it on.

Whether he then sees the world clearly, at last, or sees himself clearly — or whether Goldstein makes either aspect plain — memory fails to tell me.

The memory, though, does help bring to the fore this thought: that in fomenting rebellion against those state governments which have adopted lock-down methods to mitigate contagion's impact, our unmasked president is, indeed, persecuting mask-wearers.

Cheers . . .

Major Tom To Face Trump

Dissociated Press, U.K. — Major Tom, famous for his courtyard perambulations in support of the British NHS, has accepted the nomination for the BOAST (British Organization Against Stupid Trumpists) party, which has gained admittance to the U.S. presidential race thanks to an epidemic-caused rules relaxation.

Observers have noted that Major Tom would run circles around the U.S. incumbent — being only physically impaired, not mentally. While his candidacy would shame the Grammatically Offensive Party, or GOP, his clarity and eloquence would set a bar for American candidates that most could best only by going under, not above, in a sort of political "Limbo."

His example of placing human compassion and personal effort above self-inflation and personal gain, however, would so dwarf the GOP that the American public would need to take care — to avoid stepping by accident on its members.

When asked for his opinion as to his chances, Major Tom quipped, "Not only do I know how to finish a race, I know how to finish a sentence. Correctly, in both cases."

Notes on the Travesty

I voted yesterday in the Wisconsin primary and wanted not to. The event was a sham forced on the state by sham politicians disguised as justices. I wanted to stay away from the polls, though, for the sake of the volunteers there. This travesty of an event imposed unduly on their elderly constitutions.

Yet I went to vote in hopes that some youths might have stepped in, to help. Youths might catch something but presumably survive.

The case proved otherwise. One regular volunteer was present, pursuing her duty. Her two usual companions were absent, I was happy to see. The village trio have been dedicated workers, election after election, without, as it happens, growing any younger.

The voting process seemed slightly streamlined in response to the conditions. Unfortunately, the one person who replaced the two missing ones was another woman whom I might have guessed — well, not younger.

Statistically it would seem highly unlikely that yesterday's primary should not result in more illness. Though adequate measures were taken, the fact that health-care workers are falling ill during this epidemic makes a strong case for adequacy being inadequate.

And who holds the blame, if anyone falls ill in Wisconsin as a result of the primary? Or if anyone dies?

The party in Wisconsin that holds the state Senate, House, and Supreme Court, and that pushed through this primary, wields the power that it does thanks to outside forces. A pair of brothers with money-bag eyes were two of the highest angels, so to speak.

Which I mention in the context of guilt. It sits not entirely within this state's borders, even if all of guilt's puppets do.

If the state's Republican party members do not vote their politicians out of office, as soon as possible, then they, too, will be accepting whatever guilt there is to be passed around. Or at least accepting their responsibility for heartless stupidity.

For heartless stupidity might explain yesterday's travesty.

Heartless stupidity, naturally, stands not even a safe six feet away from cruelty.

And if anyone falls ill, or just falls over, due to this travesty, how can we not call the travesty's imposition cruel?

We know that it was unnecessary.

All Today's Observances Banned

Dissociated Press, Washington, April First: The President announced early today the banning of all April Fools observances, as inappropriate in a time of crisis.

"This is no joke," he told reporters, which he confirmed by turning red in the face and farting from his ears, the trademark gesture that made him the darling of red-in-the-face states.

In a related move, administration forces, by the U.S. Senate fondly called the Russian Trolls, shut down the website of presidential hopeful Bunsen Bernie on the grounds that it was a joke.

The candidate responded with a new website that stated, "In looking at our country's leadership now I finally understand what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant when he said, 'The world of men show like a comedy without laughter.'"

The president said, "That's not funny," and was unable to shut down the new website as a consequence.

— By Ezra Pines, DP's reporter on the Fool on the Hill.

A Dream of Noise

For some days my shirt pocket has been holding, near my heart, a dream of un-dreamlike immediacy and almost palpable reality.

In it, the incompetence and brash blunderings, verbal and otherwise, of a certain world leader make a saint of him. Through his actions and inactions he forces his country into a corner where the practices and processes falter that have primarily a monetary reason for being. Of the space it occupied before, no more than this corner remains to his country. Only through dedication to individual well-being on a universal basis may it again enjoy freedom of the whole room. Capitalism staggers, if not quite collapses. A socialist remedy offers the sole recourse. The solution to the country's ills requires cooperation, mutual regard, and thoughtfulness.

Meanwhile the roads are emptying. We hear "the busy hum of men" — that hum which drew Milton's youthful thoughts toward the city and away from rustic ways and pleasures — die down to something un-busy, if a hum at all. We find ourselves swept up, too, in helping meet the Paris Accord. Up till now, emissions-reduction guidelines have generated much hot air and heated reaction, contrary to their aim. Cooler exhalations emerge. Not only have we shown ourselves that human health towers over the putatively all-powerful deity of The Economy, but we find that the quieting of the busy hum puts us in the corner of what we call Nature, or the Earth.

Our corner seems not so small, suddenly; and that old room, the one from which our country is in retreat, less large.

Absurd, you say? Dreams are. And which would we rather have? A lamed Hephaestus named The Economy, or a Nature in the process of being murdered? Do we not hope to hear that shout across the waves from a far island: "Oh — I was wrong! Pan is not quite dead!"

Besides the staggering Economy and a more freely breathing Nature, those among us who regularly attend the church of Poetry are learning that a revered spirit, that of Silence, has not forsaken the human world. With what pleasure, the other morning, I stepped out to check our bird feeders and heard chickadees, finches, and, in the distance, crows — but not a motor, even though a state highway cuts through our village not a block away, and another, larger one transects it but a mile from here.

Single-handedly for his country, through ill-meaning impatience and self-interested blindness, this world leader has subdued the malignant deity that propped him up, has abruptly lowered fossil-fuel emissions, and here and there, now and then, has restored the Sabbath stillness that has gone missing from even the Sabbath. Seeing this man-child of tantrums wearing this new halo of wholesome achievement, we may feel the urge to raise him to sainthood — even though he has proven himself not quite the material for presidency.

How strange it has seemed to me that this last should still have needed proving. But much has seemed strange, and worse than strange, even before this time of calamity and fatality.

Weekday mornings, in our village, we listen in vain for Silence. The local bank has been building a new, large facility near here, which as yet is but a steel skeleton with walls and a few window-openings. The construction crew still appears early for work, running potent equipment and driving outsized vehicles over what peace and quiet might lie in their path — as such vehicles do, without asking permission from nearby ears.

In my mind, dare I say, I see shambling members of a dying race toiling in the lifeless shell of a temple to money earned from money.

We never will leave our noise behind us, though — except by going extinct. We never will leave it because it is a part of us — a part that has been stolen, disfigured, and amplified by motors and automatic tools, and rendered so malignantly overpowering that it dominates some arts. Reading Keats, though, teaches us that "gently whisp'ring noise" may mark a realm where gathered souls may find fulfillment. "Noise" appears in his sonnet "To My Brothers" not as an awkward rhyme that Keats forced into place, but as a fitting word. "Noise," in his time, applied to a spectrum of sounds.

May we find it in us to re-create a vanished world, and to restore that driven-away, whispering end to the spectrum — now that restoring it has been shown humanly possible.

Elsewhere . . . the life of the sea returns to Venice, and blue to the sky of China. Perhaps in those places as here, the life of the soul threatens a return, to meliorate an increasingly uncivil civilization. Silence opens the door for such a return.

I personally would rather not see a blathering blusterer ascend to sainthood — so well-suited does he seem to descent. I have in mind, however, Emerson's conception of a force that he called Fate, that goes masked in many guises.

"If Fate is ore and quarry," he says, "if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities, oppositions, and weights are wings and means, — we are reconciled."

May we all so be, if and when we see the good in the making.