writing which preserves forever still another crowd of bright and deathless figures on the beaches near Troy. One recalls fugitive other pieces. The English are all worn out and awry? Just so many Cosmo Hamiltons running from WJZ? Ho! Ho! Ho! Stop me if you've heard this one.
I wish to God we had one American who gave the promise of some day living, on a hill somewhere, comparable to Boar's Hill in Oxford, who might dump four volumes of Masefield's stuff down upon this desk. Then there would be another Anglo-phobe following the trail which Sinclair Lewis blazes anew whenever he returns from London, monocle in eye, stars and stripes forever.
It seems to me that Masefield can take his own epitaph from a thought expressed in one of his own prefaces: "It is only by such vision that the multitude can be brought to the passionate knowledge of things exulting and eternal." His stuff is "exulting and eternal" in its essence. That icy climb of Dauber over the futtock shrouds, the flight of the boy in The Everlasting Mercy, the core of Masefield's shorter songs, the penetration in his play of The Faithful, these things are filled with exultation, and they possibly will survive as long as English is read.
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