“Good-bye, professor,” she said.  “I thought you wouldn’t mind if ...”  She hesitated.  The professor thought she looked rather pitiful and thin and tired.

“No, Jane,” he answered quietly.  “You are not to go.  I don’t suppose you will understand, but my dreams have all gone—­and the vision has come.  And I need you, Jane.”

“Then you forgive me?” she said tremulously.  “I did not know ...”

“There is nothing to forgive, Jane.  I did not know, either.”

Jane broke down and the professor rose and put his arms around her, awkwardly, and kissed her.  He had not kissed her in years.  They sat down together before the hearth and gazed into the blackened ashes.  He held her hand in his.  Finally she spoke.  She almost understood—­

“Shall we have apple dumplings for supper, professor?  The kind you used to like?” She was smiling now.

“No, Jane,” he said gravely, “we’ll have peach preserves.”

Literary Monthly, 1909.

THE GOOD GREY POET

SONNET

EDWIN PARTRIDGE LEHMAN ’10

  All men must feel the beauty of a star
  That rides in the illimitable space
  Of heav’n; the beauty of an Helen’s face;
  Or of a woodland water, glimpsed afar,
  Where haze-empurpled meadows, undefined
  And slumbrous, intervene; of quiet, cool,
  Sequester’d glades, where in the level pool
  The long green rushes dip before the wind.

  These all men feel.  But three times blessed he
  Whose eye and ear, of finer fibre spun,
  Sense the elusive thread of beauty, where
  The common man hath deemed that none can be. 
  The beauty of the commonplace is one
  In substance with the beauty of the rare.

Literary Monthly, 1910.

A MINOR POET TO HIMSELF

SONNET

EDWIN PARTRIDGE LEHMAN ’10

  We lesser poets clothe in garb ornate,
  In words of dizzy fire, in awkward phrase,
  In humble thunderings, that only daze,
  Though meant to rouse in flames of love or hate,
  The thoughts that those brave souls of stuff divine,
  Whose words breathe inspiration, have long since
  In jewelled lines set forth.  Where we bear hints
  Of grape, they bear the ruddy full-pressed wine.

  And yet the fire that thrills us is no less,
  Nor coarser, than the fire that they, the great,
  Have felt.  Our pens are feebler; but the play
  Of deep emotions, the fine stir and stress
  That mark the soul’s rare movements, are, in state,
  Equal to those of lines that make men pray.

Literary Monthly, 1909.

HEARTS AND TARTS

AN OLD TALE RETOLD