, by way of my little paralyzed daughter.
Her lifeless hands led me; I think her tiny feet still know
beautiful paths.

Mr. Holliday does well to point out that Kilmer was almost unique in
this country as a representative of the Bellocian School of Catholic
journalism, in which piety and mirth dwell so comfortably together;
though he might have mentioned T. A. Daly as an older and subtler master
of devout merriment, dipping in his own inkwell rather than in any
imported bottles. It is to Belloc, of course, and to Gilbert
Chesterton, that one must go to learn the secret of Kilmer's literary
manner. Yet, as Holliday affirms, the similarity is due as much to an
affinity of mind with these Englishmen as to any eagerness to imitate.
Kilmer was like them in being essentially a humorist. One glance at his
face, with its glowing red-brown eyes (the colour of port wine), and the
twitching in-drawn corners of the mouth, gave the observer an impression
of benignant drollery. Mr. Holliday well says: "People have made very
creditable reputations as humorists who never wrote anything like as
humorous essays as those of Joyce Kilmer. They fairly reek with the joy
of life."

"He that lives by the pen shall perish by the pen," the biographer tells
us, quoting James Huneker. "For a sapling poet, within a few short years
and by the hard business of words, to attain to a secretary and a butler
and a family of, at length, four children, is a modern Arabian Nights
Tale." Aye, indeed! But Joyce Kilmer will have as genuine a claim on
remembrance by reason of his friends' love as in anything his own hand
penned. And what an encircling, almost paternal, gentleness there is in
the picture of the young poet as a salesman at Scribner's bookstore:

His smile, never far away, when it came was winning, charming. It
broke like spring sunshine, it was so fresh and warm and clear.
And there was noticeable then in his eyes a light, a quiet glow,
which marked him as a spirit not to be forgotten. So tenderly
boyish was he in effect that his confreres among the book clerks
accepted with difficulty the story that he was married. When it
was told that he had a son they gasped their incredulity. And
when one day this extraordinary elfin sprite remarked that at the
time of his honeymoon he had had a beard they felt (I remember)
that the world was without power to astonish them further.

And even mor