A sweet and bruised array, So late in splendor burning, To what blind prison of clay Dumbly returning? REQUIEM BY RICHARD CHURCH [The Spectator] A STRANGER told me you were dead, But as, half reverently, he told Telling your dreams to me, the hopes Rising and falling to the moon White as a troubled tide That sweeps the world, but cannot find A place to abide. Youth upon your shoulders lay, A cloak that made you one With the luring beauty of the South; Warm as the Sun. Your hair was fragrant in those days, And your eager hands would touch The empty air, as though your thoughts Were fruit to clutch. You would not rest. One night you lay I saw the torment of your sleep - Day-long, night-long, throbbing heart, LUDWIG BARTH, AUTOGRAPH COLLECTOR In his castle in Graz, Styria, dwells Ludwig Barth, king of all the autograph collectors in the world, and with him dwells his Book. No ordinary book, for in it are nineteen hundred autographs of the most famous personages of the modern world, and four hundred pictures, every one with associations that put it almost beyond price. In it, too, are the results of seventeen years of ceaseless labor and the expenditure of seventy thousand (pre-war) francs. Other autograph collectors are satisfied to obtain their prizes by letter. Not so Herr Barth, who has secured all but two or three of his nineteen hundred by personal interviews. 'You deserve the Nobel prize!' exclaimed the King of Denmark, as he turned the pages of the Book. 'Sire, I prefer your autograph,' replied Herr Barth. The King reached for his pen. The Mikado of Japan, the Shah of Persia, ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II, ex-President Wilson, Emperor Francis Joseph, King Edward VII, Queen Mary, and King George have all inscribed the pages of the Book; and artists and scientists whose distinction equals or surpasses that of rulers of nations are there as well: Ernst Haeckel, Puccini, Grieg, Israels, Rodin, Defregger, Solomon J. Solomons. This book of autographs is an international rendezvous, and the memoirs of its maker, if they are ever written, will be a contribution both to history and to literature; for Herr Barth has met well-nigh all the makers of the modern world. Chatting quietly with the visitor who bends above the wonderful pages of his treasure, the old col lector tells in a talk of ten minutes what King Edward said to him at Marienbad, King George in Buckingham Palace, Pius X in the Vatican, Sarah Bernhardt in Paris, and Queen Mary just after her coronation. Musicians add a few bars of music above their names, famous painters draw sketches. In the book is the last sketch that Hodler made before his death, while the autographs of Dreyfus, his accusers, and his defenders, give way to the makers of modern history. Kitchener is there, and Mackensen, and Hindenburg, who, Herr Barth thinks, allows himself to be too much fêted by his admiring fellow citizens. He pauses reverently above the page where the Emperor Francis Joseph wrote 'Viribus Unitis,' and then turns the page to where another signature stands, with a date just before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles-'Woodrow Wilson.' Clemenceau's signature is not among the nineteen hundred, and there is an interesting reason for its absence. Before he signed, the Frenchman was idly turning the pages, when he came upon a bold signature-Wilhelm II.' He leaped from his chair, he even rushed to a window and opened it to let in the fresh air, and has ever since firmly refused to sign his name in the same book. I wanted it photographed first [says Herr Barth of his book as he tells why he refused an offer of $500,000 from Pierpont Morgan]. If I had to part with my treasure, then I felt that the whole world must share it. Morgan would not consent. So I was content to remain poor and keep my ideals. Of course, though that was a fancy price, the intrinsic value has increased immensely since then. I had some trouble with the Kaiser, too, at an historic time the date is the week of the Morocco crisis. A telegram from the Emperor Francis Joseph, telling him he had been proud to sign among such company, induced him at last. Queen Mary of England gave me hers a day after her coronation; I found King Edward and King George both charming and genial in a totally different way. The Prince of Monaco insisted on using the last page: 'Rien ne va plus.' Is there not something pathetic about this portrait which the Empress Eugénie gave me as an aged woman? Her picture the age of seventeen. at THE City Corporation of London has decided to name one of its streets for Samuel Pepys, and the street selected is to be one which was intimately associated with the quaint diarist during his lifetime. It will probably bear the full name, Samuel Pepys Street, though there is a possibility that it will be called merely Pepys Street. Mr. Walter G. Bell, in an article in the Daily Telegraph, hails the naming with delight: That is as it should be. If there is a typical Londoner, surely it is old Pepys. What stone of London did he not know? A man of affairs before all things, a man of middle-class origin, as we should say today, though thrown into constant contact with the great, and, as his not inconsiderable 'gettings' accumulated, with some pretensions himself to be of 'the quality,' --Pepys was quite unlike his contemporary diarist, John Evelyn. The last-named traveled the world, and delighted to tell us about it, with some grandiloquence. Pepys had traveled London and no man who has done that thoroughly can be said to be ill-equip ped. Both were egoists, but there is a naïvete about Samuel Pepys's egoism which has more charm, is much more alluring, than Evelyn's cold correctness. Evelyn was I fear, a prig, and to his companions, I feel sure, a bore. He never forgot his birth and station, having no reason to do so. Perhaps Pepys, whose vanity in himself is an enduring delight, thought he had such reason. Pepy's name will probably be given to one of the new streets to be constructed about the new buildings of the Port of London Authority, overlooking Tower Hill. While he was Clerk of the Acts, the diarist lived in the Navy Office in Seething Lane. The Port of London Authority's buildings have cleared and overrun one side of the old Seething Lane, and the site of the old Navy Office is now within their boundary. Whichever of the new streets is selected, therefore, will have a certain intimate association with one of the quaintest figures in literature. Mr. Bell claims the distinction of having definitely established Pepys's London birth. He was known to have been the son of a tailor, John Pepys, whose shop had been established in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, which backed on St. Bride's Churchyard. Since all the old diarist's associations are with London, his father's long residence there seemed to establish London as his birthplace; but conclusive proof was still lacking, and there were undoubted associations with Brampton in Huntingdonshire, where his early schooldays are known to have been spent, which led certain biographers to regard it as the birthplace. However, says Mr. Bell, Chance came to me one day, when exploring the registers of St. Bride's Church in Fleet Street, to alight upon a baptismal entry which ran, 'Samuel, sonn to John Peapis, wyef Margaret,' at a date when Samuel was just eight days old - for the day of his birth is well established by his 'Diary.' That, of course, settled all disputation. Samuel Pepys was born in the house in Salisbury Court, a Londoner of ourselves, and properly the famous City is about to honor her famous son. THE SCIENTIFIC INACCURACIES OF THE POETS SCIENTIFIC blunders by poets of distinction have been catalogued by the London Morning Post, which finds Longfellow and Tennyson among the chief offenders, and agrees with Theodore Watts-Dunton, that Browning never understood the theory of organic evolution. Longfellow's blunder occurs in Hiawatha, in which he writes: Swift of foot was Hiawatha: He could shoot an arrow from him, He could shoot ten arrows upward, The English writer, being of a statistical frame of mind and unwilling to allow a poet anything at all in the way of hyperbole, points out that, in one case, Hiawatha would have had to run forty-six miles an hour, and that in the other he would have had to shoot at the rate of ninety arrows a minute. Tennyson is guilty of inaccuracy in his lines, Every moment dies a man, which occur in 'The Vision of Sin.' it is even truer that inventors of calculating machines would better not try to read poetry. THE TOMB OF DANTE'S PATRON VERONA'S celebration of the sixth centenary of Dante's death was marked by an extremely interesting ceremony the opening of the sarcophagus of Can Grande, the most famous member of the Scaliger family, a great captain, and the protector and friend of Dante. From time to time the question has been raised whether the sarcophagus really contained the body, and Count Serego Allighiero, who claims descent from Dante himself, secured permission to set all doubt at rest by opening it. When the heavy lid was lifted off, the embalmed body appeared, still well preserved after six centuries. It lay on the right side, facing the west. The head was still covered with brown hair, and the expression of the face, with high forehead and hard chin, was clearly discernible. The right hand was entirely intact. Can Grande's body was wrapped in a yellow silk cloth, with magnificent gold embroidery and blue bands, the colors of the old Veronese banner. By its side lay a large sword, badly rusted; and scattered in the sarcophagus were dried flowers and aromatic herbs. Only the sword was removed, to be placed in the city museum, and the sarcophagus was again closed. This is the ancient warrior who gives the title to Miss Amy Lowell's poem, Can Grande's Castle. A PILGRIMAGE TO THE 'ROCK OF AGES' THOUSANDS of Churchmen and Nonconformists joined recently in a pilgrimage to the great rock at Burrington Combs, Somersetshire, which, according to tradition, inspired Augustus Toplady to write the hymn, 'Rock of Ages.' The clergyman is said to have been overtaken by a storm at this point and to have sought shelter in a cleft in the great mass of stone, and, looking out from it, to have been inspired to write his hymn. Certain chronological difficulties decrease the probability of the tradition, but it can never be definitely disproved. The hymn is said to have been written during Toplady's curacy in the Mendip Hills, that is, between 1762 and 1764; but not a line of it is definitely known to have existed until 1775, when Toplady printed the first two lines of the first stanza and the last two of the third in an article in the Gospel Magazine. The complete text was printed in the same journal during the following year. The cleft in the rock is very large, an adequate shelter for several men, and the cliff itself towers far above the head of the passer-by. The service which concluded the pilgrimage was held directly in front of the poet's shelter from the storm. * TIMEPIECES OF FOUR CENTURIES VIENNA now boasts possession of the largest collection of clocks and watches in the world, for the municipal museum has lately been enriched by three private collections, each one notable in itself. A Viennese teacher, for many years amused himself by forming a collection of timepieces, which has now come into the hands of the municipal authorities. Shortly after this, two leading business men bought the famous collection formed by the Austrian poet, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and presented it to the museum. Still a third collection has since been added, that of an old watchmaker, Master Nikolaus, who was compelled by the fuel scarcity of 1917 to sell his treasures for a small sum of money and a few tons of coal. He retained eight especially valuable clocks, with which he could not bear to part. The combined collections include clocks of four centuries. Some are very primitive affairs with clumsy works and only a single hand, for they date back to an age when time was of so much less importance than it is now, that people were content to know the hour only and did not trouble themselves about the minutes. When the clocks are kept running, the museum is a horological pandemonium. The 'Egg of Nuremberg,' a watch shaped like an egg, tiny watches placed within a silver thaler, or in a lady's ring, clocks with musical boxes, cuckoo clocks from the Black Forest, tremendous church-clocks the timepieces of all the generations since clocks began to be are represented. Nor is the precision of a scientific age neglected. Our own time is represented by two electric precision clocks, so exact that for months their pendulums have been swinging in perfect unison. BOOKS MENTIONED von Schoen, Freiherr: Erlebtes, Beiträge zur politischen Geschichte der neusten Zeit. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Stuttgart. Geb. 30 marks. Jonescu, Take: Souvenirs. Payot. Paris. The Evolution of World Peace: Essays, arranged and edited by F. S. Marion. Oxford University Press. London. 9s. 6d. net. |