alk about, and breathe, and speak, and love,
How one would tremble, and in what surprise
Gasp: "Can you move?"

I see men walking, and I always feel:
"Earth! How have you done this? What can you be?"
I can't learn how to know men, or conceal
How strange they are to me.

_T. M. Kettle_

Thomas M. Kettle was born at Artane County, Dublin, in 1880 and was
educated at University College, where he won the Gold Medal for
Oratory. His extraordinary faculty for grasping an intricate problem
and crystallizing it in an epigram, or scoring his adversaries with
one bright flash, was apparent even then. He was admitted to the bar
in 1905 but soon abandoned the law to devote himself to journalism,
which, because of his remarkable style, never remained journalism in
his hands. In 1906 he entered politics; in 1910 he was re-elected for
East Tyrone. Even his bitterest opponents conceded that Tom Kettle (as
he was called by friend and enemy) was the most honorable of fighters;
they acknowledged his honesty, courage and devotion to the cause of a
United Ireland--and respected his penetrating wit. He once spoke of a
Mr. Healy as "a brilliant calamity" and satirized a long-winded
speaker by saying, "Mr. Long knows a sentence should have a beginning,
but he quite forgets it should also have an end."

"An Irish torch-bearer" (so E. B. Osborn calls him), Kettle fell in
action at Ginchy, leading his Fusiliers in September, 1916. The
uplifted poem to his daughter was written shortly before his death.

TO MY DAUGHTER BETTY, THE GIFT OF GOD

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,--
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

_Alfred Noyes_

Alfred Noyes was born at Staffordshire, September 16, 1880. He is one
of the few contemporary poets who have been fortunate enough to write
a kind of poetry that is not only s