Vachel Lindsay and I have often discussed over a glass of port (one glass only:  alas, that Vachel should abstain!) the state of the Muse to-day.  He deems that she now has fled from cities to dwell on the robuster champaigns of Illinois and Kansas.  Would that I could agree; but I see her in the cities and everywhere, set down to menial taskwork.  She were better in exile, on Ibsen’s sand dunes or Maeterlinck’s bee farm.  But in America the times are very evil.  Prodigious convulsion of production, the grinding of mighty forces, the noise and rushings of winds—­and what avails? Parturiunt montes ...you know the rest.  The ridiculous mice squeak and scamper on the granary floor.  They may play undisturbed, for the real poets, those great gray felines, are sifting loam under Westminster.  Gramercy Park and the Poetry Society see them not.

It matters not.  With this little book my task is done.  Vachel and I sail to-morrow for Nova Zembla.

The Grotto, Yonkers.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

A second edition of “Rari Nantes” having been called for, I have added three more poems, Esquimodes written since arriving here.  Also the “Prayer for Warm Weather,” by Vachel Lindsay, is included, at his express request.  The success of the first edition has been very gratifying to me.  My publishers will please send reviews to Bleak House, Nova Zembla.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

The rigorous climate of Nova Zembla I find most stimulating to production, and therefore in this new edition I am able to include several new poems.  “The Ode to a Seamew,” the “Fracas on an Ice Floe,” and the sequence of triolimericks are all new.  If I have been able to convey anything of the bracing vigour of the Nova Zembla locale the praise is due to my friendly and suggestive critic, the editor of Gooseflesh, the leading Nova Zemblan review.

Vachel Lindsay’s new book, “The Tango,” has not yet appeared, therefore I may perhaps say here that he is hard at work on an “Ode to the Gulf Stream,” which has great promise.

The success of this little book has been such that I am encouraged to hope that the publisher’s exemption of royalties will soon be worked off.

THE SKIPPER

I have been reading again that most delightful of all autobiographies, “A Personal Record,” by Joseph Conrad.  Mr. Conrad’s mind is so rich, it has been so well mulched by years of vigorous life and sober thinking, that it pushes tendrils of radiant speculation into every crevice of the structure upon which it busies itself.  This figure of speech leaves much to be desired and calls for apology, but in perversity and profusion the trellis growth of Mr. Conrad’s memories, here blossoming before the delighted reader’s eyes, runs like some