stood the Catalan's phrase: the
family was the chain on which lives were strung, and all of Maragall's
lyricizing of wifehood,

When the wife sits singing as she spins
all the house can sleep in peace.

From the fishermen's huts down the beach came an intense blue smoke of
fires; above the soft rustle of the swell among the boats came the
chatter of many sleepy voices, like the sound of sparrows in a city
park at dusk. The day dissolved slowly in utter timelessness. And when
the last fishing boat came out of the dark sea, the tall slanting sail
folding suddenly as the wings of a sea-gull alighting, the red-brown
face of the man in the bow was the face of returning Odysseus. It was
not the continuity of men's lives I felt, but their oneness. On that
beach, beside that sea, there was no time.

When we were eating in the whitewashed room by the light of three brass
olive oil lamps, I found that my argument had suddenly crumbled. What
could I, who had come out of ragged and barbarous outlands, tell of the
art of living to a man who had taught me both system and revolt? So am
I, to whom the connubial lyrics of Patmore and Ella Wheeler Wilcox have
always seemed inexpressible soiling of possible loveliness, forced to
bow before the rich cadences with which Juan Maragall, Catalan, poet of
the Mediterranean, celebrates the _familia_.

And in Maragall's work it is always the Mediterranean that one feels,
the Mediterranean and the men who sailed on it in black ships with
bright pointed sails. Just as in Homer and Euripides and Pindar and
Theocritus and in that tantalizing kaleidoscope, the Anthology, beyond
the grammar and the footnotes and the desolation of German texts there
is always the rhythm of sea waves and the smell of well-caulked ships
drawn up on dazzling beaches, so in Maragall, beyond the graceful
well-kept literary existence, beyond wife and children and pompous
demonstrations in the cause of abstract freedom, there is the sea
lashing the rocky shins of the Pyrenees,--actual, dangerous, wet.

In this day when we Americans are plundering the earth far and near for
flowers and seeds and ferments of literature in the hope, perhaps vain,
of fallowing our thin soil with manure rich and diverse and promiscuous
so that the somewhat sickly plants of our own culture may burst sappy
and green through the steel and cement and inhibitions of our lives, we
should not forget that northwest corner of the Mediterranean