petulance he laid its loss to the German submarines, which he declared sank everything that was being sent to him. I found the trail to another copy of "Verses" still more elusive; and, to tell the truth, I really don't know whether or not I got another copy off to him. This story is to show that anyone who has a copy of that book now has a volume far from readily found.

Copies of the original edition of "The Circus" are somewhat easier to lay hold of. Doubtless, though, they will soon be scarce, as the original edition could not have been large. And the book will not be reprinted in its first form. With all the untoward circumstances of its publication, however, "The Circus" did seem to find its way to no mean circle of friends. When the memorial volumes, "Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and Letters," were published in the autumn of 1918, numerous inquiries were received by the publishers as to why the essays which comprised the volume "The Circus" were not included. The explanation is this: In the continuance of the entanglement of the affairs of Mr. Gomme's former business no clear title to the rights of this book was at that time in sight. Since then these matters have all been straightened out, and, I am happy to be able to say, this excellent friend of Joyce Kilmer is again in circumstances more auspicious than before, and with joy to his fine heart, effectively serving the cause of good books.

In direct critical appreciation of these ten essays there is not much that I care to say. They were written by my friend, and are therefore holy. That is, of course, to me. They may be charged with being very youthful. Aye; even so.

Their youthfulness is to me a thing of very poignant, tender beauty. I see again that radiant boy, trailing clouds of glory come from God who was his home. His childhood spent in "a town less than a hundred miles from New York," "now he feels himself actually a New Yorker," "enjoys the proud novelty of working for wages," and "joyfully, therefore, he goes forth every noon to explore the territory of his new possession." The subway was to him "the great nickel adventure"; a ride on the elevated railroad, "aërial journeying"; his alarm clock, "the urban chanticleer." Again, as a commuter, I see him on the 5.24, flying across "leagues" to his cottage in the "primeval forest" of New Jersey. On his "red velvet chair" he sits, "enjoying with his neighbors tobacco smoke, rapid travel, and the news of the world." None ever enjoyed these things more, red velvet chair and all!

The connection which I may boast of having with the writing of some of these essays illustrates in an amusing way the pleasantly pugnacious character of Joyce's mind. Joyce held that I was offensively æsthetic in regarding sign-boards about the countryside as ugly things. "Signs and Symbols" was his hilarious and scornful rebuke. "The Gentle Art of Christmas Giving" (a New York Times article reprinted in the two-volume set) had a similar origin. You remember with what amusing gusto it begins:

If a dentist stuck a bit of holly in his cap and went through the streets on Christmas morning, his buzzing drill over his shoulder and his forceps in his hand, stopping at the houses of his friends to give their jaws free treatment, meanwhile trolling out lusty Yuletide staves—if he were to do this, I say, it would be said of him, among other things, that he was celebrating Christmas in a highly original manner. Undoubtedly there would be many other adjectives applied to his manner of generosity—adjectives applied, for instance, by the children whom, around their gayly festooned tree, he surprised with his gift of expert treatment. But the adjective most generally used (not perhaps in adulation) would be "original." And the use of this adjective would be utterly wrong.

The holly-bedecked dentist would not be acting in the original manner. He would be following the suggestion of his own philanthropic heart. He would be acting in accordance with tradition, a particularly annoying tradition, the evil and absurd superstition that a gift should be representative of the giver rather than of the recipient.

That "particularly annoying tradition," that "evil and absurd superstition," I had been guilty of voicing a few days before he wrote this article. He looked at me with withering commiseration.

If, in the days when he was writing the essays of "The Circus," Joyce had the effect of being ridiculously young, he was also (with affection I say it) ridiculously wise for his years. I can hear the sturdy sound of his voice in the phrase (in the essay "The Abolition of Poets"), "those ridiculous young people who call themselves Imagists and Vorticists and similar queer names." And what joyous satire here:

And there is Zipp, the What-is-it? most venerable of freaks, whose browless tufted head and amazing figure have entertained his visitors since Phineas Taylor Barnum engaged him to ornament his museum on Ann Street. For all I know, Zipp is a poet—his smile is lyrical, and in his roving eyes there is a suggestion of vers libre.

Then, with the mellow humor of paternal experience he discusses (in "The Day After Christmas") that hypothetical person who is three, and who, he regrets to say, is "somewhat sticky"; who, further, had in all confidence requested Santa Claus to bring him a large live baboon, but who had been brought instead a small tin monkey on a stick. Or, again, babies who at somewhere between six and eight in the morning, "seeing that their weary parents are leaving them, decide at last that it is time to go to sleep."

And even then, as throughout his later years, he had that (manly not sentimental) intuitive sympathy for those by fortune afflicted. In "The Circus":

The freaks get large salaries (they seem large to poets), and they are carefully tended, for they are delicate. See, here is a man who lives although his back is broken. There is a crowd around him; how interested they are! Would they be as interested in a poet who lived although his heart was broken? Probably not. But then, there are not many freaks.

Nor did his perception of sorrow come to him solely by intuition. Far from it. No, this very valiant and very young man himself had experienced the fact that an alarm clock "can utter harsh and strident grief, those know who lie down with Sorrow and must awaken with her."

To me there is something indescribably touching even in Joyce's most hilarious flights of fancy in these essays. I cannot tell you why this is so. Perhaps it is because his jocund humor, like all else, sprang from a heart so woven of the common strands of humanity.

When Adam watched with pleased astonishment an agile monkey leap among the branches of an Eden tree, and laughed at the foolish face of a giraffe, he saw a circus. Delightedly now would he sit upon a rickety chair beneath a canvas roof, smell the romantic aroma of elephant and trampled grass, and look at wonders.

The most obvious thing, of course, about these essays is their Chestertonian spirit and manner. In the matter of the manner, Mr. Chesterton's trick of "reverse English," to employ the billiard player's term, take this:

It would be the mere prose of our daily life for birds to fly about close to the tent's roof, and for men and women to ring bells and sit in rocking chairs. It is the poetry of the circus