o those of great intellectual stature. Upon the
literary vehicles of expression habitually employed by Rudyard Kipling,
Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and Hilaire Belloc I have wafted a pinch
of ragweed and goldenrod; with surprising results. These intellectuals
were not more immune than myself. For instance, this is the spasm
ejaculated by Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, of Spoon River:

Ed Grimes always did hate me
Because I wrote better poetry than he did.
In the hay fever season I used to walk
Along the river bank, to keep as far as possible
Away from pollen.
One day Ed and his brother crept up behind me
While I was writing a sonnet,
Tied my hands and feet,
And carried me into a hayfield and left me.
I sneezed myself to death.
At the funeral the church was full of goldenrod,
And I think it must have been Ed
Who sowed that ragweed all round my grave.

The Lord loveth a cheerful sneezer, and Mr. Masters deserves great
credit for lending himself to the cult in this way.

I am a fanatical admirer of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, and have even
thought of spending fifty of my own dollars, privily and without
collusion with his publisher, to advertise that remarkable book of his
called "WE" which is probably the ablest and most original, and
certainly the most verbose, book that has been written about the war.
Now Mr. Lee (let me light my pipe and get this right) is the most
eminent victim of words that ever lived in New England (or indeed
anywhere east of East Aurora). Words crowd upon him like flies upon a
honey-pot: he is helpless to resist them. His brain buzzes with them:
they leap from his eye, distil from his lean and waving hand. Good God,
not since Rabelais and Lawrence Sterne, miscalled Reverend, has one
human being been so beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables.
I adore him for it, but equally I tremble. Glowing, radiant,
transcendent vocables swim and dissolve in the porches of his brain,
teasing him with visions far more deeply confused than ever Mr.
Wordsworth's were. The meanest toothbrush that bristles (he has
confessed it himself) can fill him with thoughts that do often lie too
deep for publishers. Perhaps the orotund soul-wamblings of Coleridge are
recarnate in him, Scawfell become Mount Tom. Who knows? Once I sat at
lunch with him, and though I am Trencherman Fortissimus (I can give you
testimonials) my hamburg steak fell from my hand as I listened