A
queer creature, this. Day by day he lugs that bag with him yet
spends all his time reading the papers and rarely using the books he
carries. His pipe always goes out just as he reaches his station;
frantically he tries to fill and light it before the train stops.
Sometimes he digs deeply into the bag and brings out a large slab of
chocolate, which he eats with an air of being slightly ashamed of
himself. The oddities of this person do not amuse us any the less
because he happens to be ourself.
So fares the commuter: a figure as international as the teddy bear.
He has his own consolations--of a morning when he climbs briskly
upward from his dark tunnel and sees the sunlight upon the spread
wings of the Telephone and Telegraph Building's statue, and moves
again into the stirring pearl and blue of New York's lucid air. And
at night, though drooping a little in the heat and dimness of those
Oyster Bay smoking cars, he is dumped down and set free. As he
climbs the long hill and tunes his thoughts in order, the sky is a
froth of stars.
[Illustration]
THE PERMANENCE OF POETRY
We heard a critic remark that no great sonnets are being written
nowadays. What (he said morosely) is there in the way of a recent
sonnet that is worthy to take its place in the anthologies of the
future beside those of Sir Philip Sidney, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats,
Mrs.
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