ls of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance--

Poor starved wretches are we who live softly in the lower stories,
although we are fat of body.

If a mighty pair of shears were to clip the city somewhere below these
windy gutters would there not be a dearth of poems in the spring? Who
then would be left to note the changing colors of the twilight and the
peaceful transit of the stars? Would gray beech trees in the winter
find a voice? Would there still be a song of water and of wind? Who
would catch the rhythm of the waves and the wheat fields in the
breeze? What lilts and melodies would vanish from the world! How stale
and flat the city without its roofs!

But it is at night that these roofs show best. Then, as below a
philosopher in his tower, the city spreads its web of streets, and its
lights gleam in answer to the lights above. Galileo in his
tower--Teufelsdroeckh at his far-seeing attic window--saw this
glistening pageantry and had thoughts unutterable.

In this darkness these roofs are the true suburb of the world--the
outpost--the pleasant edge of our human earth turned up toward the
barren moon. Chimneys stand as sentinels on the border of the sky.
Pointed towers mark the passage of the stars. Great buildings are the
cliffs on the shores of night. A skylight shows as a pleasant signal
to guide the wandering skipper of the moon.

The Quest of the Lost Digamma.

Many years ago there was a club of college undergraduates which called
itself the Lost Digamma. The digamma, I am informed, is a letter that
was lost in prehistoric times from the Greek alphabet. A prudent
alphabet would have offered a reward at once and would have beaten up
the bushes all about, but evidently these remedies were neglected. As
the years went on the other letters gradually assumed its duties. The
philological chores, so to speak, night and morning, that had once
fallen to the digamma, they took upon themselves, until the very name
of the letter was all but lost.

Those who are practiced in such matters--humped men who blink with
learning--claim to discover evidence of the letter now and then in
their reading. Perhaps the missing letter still gives a false quantity
to a vowel or shifts an accent. It is remembered, as it were, by its
vacant chair. Or rather, like a ghost it haunts a word, rattling a
warning lest we disarrange a syllable. Its absence, howe