I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper. Perhaps BECAUSE of the wall-paper. It dwells in my mind so! I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe—and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I WILL follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.

But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it KNEW what a vicious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn’t match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.

don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it. He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another. He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction. I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.

I fear, since last it was We had a drop together. Welcome home!”

Here there is death. But even here, they say, — Here where the dull sun shines this afternoon As desolate as ever the dead moon Did glimmer on dead Sardis,

SEEDS in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel– Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens– But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof. Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Ballades by the score with the same old thought:

From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,” Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels, The grained arm that pulls the hands, They Lion grow.

The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose They Lion grow.

From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,

The coarse defeats the twice-refined,

Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea, That falls incessant on the empty shore, Most various Man, cut down to spring no more;

t well may be. I do not think I would.

nd other withered stumps of time Were told upon the walls; staring forms Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. Footsteps shuffled on the stair. Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

If there were water    And no rock    If there were rock    And also water    And water    A spring    A pool among the rock    If there were the sound of water only    Not the cicada    And dry grass singing    But sound of water over a rock    Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees    Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop    But there is no water   Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses.

And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

Some have relied on what they knew; Others on simply being true. What worked for them might work for you.

My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.

I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence:

In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast. In vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem:—

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

The historian was thus reduced to his last resources. Clearly if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value, this common value could have no measure but that of their attraction on his own mind.

From Zeno to Descartes, hand in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one stumbled as stupidly as though one were still a German student of 1860. Only with the instinct of despair could one force one’s self into this old thicket of ignorance after having been repulsed a score of entrances more promising and more popular. Thus far, no path had led anywhere, unless perhaps to an exceedingly modest living.

I would like a thousand most most. Center pricking petunia.

Foolish is foolish is. Birds measure birds measure stores birds measure stores measure birds measure. Exceptional firm bites. How do you do I forgive you everything and there is nothing to forgive. Never the less. Leave it to me.

Come one day.

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox

sent out at fifteen to work in some hard-pressed house in the suburbs— some doctor’s family, some Elsie— voluptuous water expressing with broken

They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind—