pleads for less artificiality and more. naturalness. He delivers himself now with the straight-out blow, now by suggestion or indirection. He does not shirk the ugly word or name, and yet sees the world as so much plastic clay to be shaped to forms of beauty.

"I sing of life," he says:

"I sing of life, not glozed with silk and gems,

But grimed in sweat-shop, groggery and dive,

Mocked in palatial halls of empty

pomp,

Flung from divorce courts and from bated breath

Of scandal mongers, eager with their tale

To damn the good name of their nearest friend."

His demand is for fulness of lifeexpression, not repression, as this from "The Cry of Life" shows:

"I am no flagellant,

With whip and scourge

In hairy coat,

No faster, no ascetic I—
"Tis good to live, to breathe
Deep draughts of fragrant morn,
Deep draughts of dewey night,

To eat sweet simples of the earth.
"To feel the tender touch of hands,
Communicable thrills awake
By their caress the throb of life
That leaps with meeting lips.
"So is my cry not death
But life! more life, replete
With all that sense can wring
Of beauty out of clay;
Full of the joy of light,
Of color and of sound,
Of redolence of flowers."

Here are passages that reflect the quest of an earnest soul for truth, and in that search doubt alike theologian and scientist.

"I crave the truth, stark, naked unashamed,

And should it smite me, let me face the pang,

Aye, turn the other cheek, and cry, again!

If I have coddled error to my breast,

Let me cast forth the viper ere it sting.

"But Gililee, the iconoclast,

Not thus obesiance made to prejudice, When he spied out God's order in the skies,

And how the riven sun in pangs of birth

Cast from its side the world,

Not e'en the Inquisition's grim intent Could shake his proclamation of the truth.

"So Darwin to the scoffers made reply With piled facts no sophistry could shake,

His the new Genesis from nature's Bible,

Of creatures struggling through milleniums,

Through patient cycles of ascending forms.

"But Science is not God's elect disciple And many an error has she treasured fast

Beneath her academic cloak of smug conceit.

Ah, savants, be not overproud, I pray, There may be finer laws than you dissolve,

With microscope and telescope and spectrum,

More subtle forces than your prying

eyes

Can penetrate amid the unknown dark. "What are your laws but visions of the

unseen Will?

What are your forces but the thinking of the perfect Mind?

So open wide your heart to His great light,

O seeker after truth."

Mr. Keeler is versatile, having a copious vocabulary and a wide range of subjects. He is a mystic, too, with a sense of the oneness of life here and "there." "With the Dead" strikingly brings this out; so does "The People of the Grave."

He is always an optimist, serene, yet at times tinged with something very much like fatalism. He says:

"Milleniums of life

Through thee reverberate.
Uncounted cycles swing

But he does not counsel passivity: "Ye cannot comprehend the cosmic plan,

So dare to walk erect and face the world.

Sing like the meadowlark in the rain. as well as the sun,

Like the snake in the springtime, slough off the scales of care,

Cast the devils out of thee and be a conqueror!"

As touching a little poem as the book contains is called "Friends." It shows the tender reaching out of a big heart to those most in need of friendship. It reads:

"Poor rum-soaked rounder of the tenderloin,

Discarded remnant of the bargain

71

of time. He sees the continuity of life through changing cycles and countless changing forms. His poetry is in fact permeated with a sense of relationship of the Now to all the Past and Present. It gives a big note, as many of the selections here quoted illustrate. Here is another with the far outreach:

"But what reck we of the glory of engines?

We cry for man's glory and the glory. of the Lord.

Aye, the world is but clay to be shaped into beauty,

And the stars in the vast are but candles on the altar.

From the first to the last, in the earth and heavens,

One miracle only can thrill with its wonder

When God breathes on atoms, and lo! they are life,

When man breaks from matter, and lo! he is love!"

There are a few personal poems included in "The Victory." The one to his little son Leonarde has been men

tioned; the others are to noted Californians-Henry Holmes, the violinist; Ina Coolbrith, the poet; William Keith, the painter, and a close personal friend.

Among Mr. Keeler's other books of Wanderer's Songs of the Sea," "Idyls poetry are "A Season's Sowing," "A of El Dorado," "Elfin Songs of Sunland," now in its second edition. He has out also quite a bit of prose. His "Bird Notes Afield" is an authority in its line, and has passed into several editions. "San Francisco and Thereabouts" is a well known volume, as is his "The Simple Home." "San Francisco Through Earthquake and Fire," "Southern California" and "Evolution of Color in the Birds of North America" are still other works from Mr.

He is a member of the Bohemian Club and wrote the Cremation of Care ceremony for the 1913 jinks. He is also a member of the Author's Club of London, and the New York Author's Club.

I

HAD been asked by so many people for my opinion of the accuracy of Stewart Edward White's "Gray Dawn," as a picture of the period that I had intended preparing a criticism from the work in its serial form. Other matters interfered with such work, and I had about abandoned the idea until I read your criticism in the January "Bookman."

You say Mr. White "has not so much tried to tell a story as to paint an epoch, the turbulent days of the early fifties in California. Undeniably he has done a good piece of work . . . . He gets the atmosphere beyond question; the book is saturated with it, redolent of it. . . it is idle to pretend that the reader will become seriously excited about the individual characters... but as a picture Francisco in the days of the gold fever and the Vigilantes and the volunteer fire companies, the 'Gray Dawn' is distinctly worth while, it bears the hallmark of truth."

of San

Were all your readers fully informed regarding the period in question your criticism would be received in the nature of an after dinner speech to be interpreted by the "brown taste" of the morning after. But, unfortunately, the majority of your readers are of those to whom everything "Western" is a terra incognita into which callow writers have adventured and have flooded the book-stores with Munchausen tales.

We of California, who have lived here nearly as long as the State has been a part of the American Union (and whose fathers and mothers were here before us, each doing his or her

part in the work of founding a commonwealth), respecting the memories of our forebears, their friends, neighbors and associates, most earnestly protest against the continued and systematic misrepresentation of the forceful and earnest life of the Pioneers of California. We have a right to be proud of those virile young men and women who, endowed wh the restless nature of Americans, braved the dangers of months of travel over almost untracked wastes or long and oft tempestuous ocean voyages that they might make for themselves homes where there was room for their energies. They may not all have been highly educated, they may not have all been poc-marked by the corroding punctualities of social precedence. But they were warm blooded human beings. For the number of inhabitants, there was no greater number of adventurers or undesirables than among our earlier ancestors in New England, or Virginia. But those people of the Californian early days lived their lives honestly, as a rule. They did not steal the livery of Heaven in which to serve the Devil. They did not practice present-day subterfuges in an effort to gain caste by deception. Yes, some of them drank, and possibly as heavily as others did in New York, for instance, at the same period. We must recall that drinking was prevalent all over the world, and had been for at least a few thousand years. That drinking was done openly and in a convivial spirit. It was not considered manly to talk prohibition and patronize "blind pigs." Yes, there was gambling. And that was done openly.