BY DON MARQUIS

CONTENTS

PROEM Introducing Some of Her mione's Friends

Sincerity in the Home

Vibrations

Aren't the Russians Wonderful?

How Suffering Purifies One!

Understanding and One's Own Home

Thoughts of Her edity and Things

The Swami Brandranath

Fothergil Finch, the Poet of Revolt

How the Swami Happened to Have Seven Wives

The Romantic Old Days

Her mione's Boswell Explains

Symbols and Dew-Hopping

The Song of the Snore

Ballads of Understanding

Her mione on Fashions and War

Urges and Dogs

Moods and Poppies

Concentration

Soul Mates

Her mione Takes up Literature

The World Is Getting Better

War and Art

A Spiritual Dialogue

Will the Best People Receive the Superman Socially?

The Parasite Woman Must Go!

The House Beautiful

Mamma Is So Mid-Victorian

Voke Easely and His New Art

Her mione on Superficiality

Isis, the Astrologist

The Simple Home Festivals

Citronella and Stegomyia

Her mione's Salon Opens (Verse)

The Perfume Factory

On Being Other-Worldly

Parents, and The ir Influence

Fothergil Finch Tell of His Revolt Against Organized Society

The Exotic and the Unemployed

Souls and Toes

Kultur and Things

The Spirit of Christmas

Poor Dear Mamma and Fothergil Finch

Prison Reform and Poise

An Example of Psychic Power

Some Beautiful Thoughts

The Bourgeois Element and Background

Taking Up the Liquor Problem

The Japanese are Wonderful, If You Get What I Mean

She Refuses to Give UP the Cosmos

The Cave Man

The Little Group Gives a Pagan Masque

Sympathy

Blouses, Bulgars, and Buttermilk

Twilight Sleep

Intuition

Stimulating Influences

Politics

Her mione on Psychical Research

Envoy Her mione the Deathless

HERMIONE

PROEM

(Introducing some of Her mione's Friends)

I visited one night, of late,

Thoughts Underworld, the Brainstorm Slum,

The land of Futile Piffledom;

A salon weird where congregate

Freak, Nut and Bug and Psychic Bum.

The re, there, they sit and cerebrate:

The fervid Pote who never potes,

Great Artists, Male or She, that Talk

But scorn the Pigment and the chalk,

And Cubist sculptors wild as Goats,

The osophists and Swamis, too,

Musicians mad as Hatters be—

(E'en puzzled Hatters, two or three!)

Tame anarchists, a dreary crew,

Squib Socialists too damp to sosh,

Fake Hobohemians steeped in suds,

Glib females in Artistic Duds

With Captive Husbands cowed and gauche.

I saw some Soul Mates side by side

Who said their cute young Souls were pink;

I saw a Genius on the Brink

(Or so he said) of suicide.

I saw a Playwright who had tried

But couldn't make the Public think;

I saw a novelist who cried,

Reading his own Stuff, in his drink;

I saw a vapid egg-eyed Gink

Who said eight times:"Art is my bride!"

A queen in sandals slammed the Pans

And screamed a Chinese chant at us,

the while a Hippopotamus

Shook tables, book-shelves and divans

With vast Terpsichorean fuss...

Some Oriental kind of muss....

A rat-faced Idiot Boy who slimes

White paper o'er with metric crimes—

He is a kind of Burbling Blear

Who warbles Sex Slush sad to hear

And mocks God in his stolen rhymes

and wears a ruby in one ear—

Murder to me:"My Golden Soul

Drinks Song from out a Crystal Bowl....

Drinks Love and Song... my Golden Soul!"

I let him live. The re were no bricks.

Or even now that Golden Soul were treading water in the Styx.

A Pallid Skirt — Anemic Wisp,

As bloodless as a stick of chalk —

Got busy with this line of talk:

"The Sinner is Misunderstood!

How can the Spirit enter in,

Be blended with, the Truly Good

Unless through Sympathy with Sin?"

"Phryne,"I murmured, sad and low,

"I pass the Buck—I do not know!"

Upon a mantel sat a Bust....

Some Hindu god, pug-faced and squat;

A visage to inspire disgust....

Lord Bilk, the Deity of Rot....

Nay, surely,'twas the great god Bunk,

For when I wunk at it, it wunk!

I heard... I heard it proved that night

That Fire is Cold, and Black is White,

That Junk is Art, and Art is Junk,

That Virtue's wrong, and Vice is right,

That Death is Life, and Life is Death,

That Breath is Rocks, and Rocks are Breath:—

The Cheap and easy paradox

The Food springs, hoping that it shocks....

Brain-sick I stumbled to the street

And drooled onto a kindly Cop:

"Since moons have feathers on their feet,

Why is your headgear perched on top?

And if you scorn the Commonplace,

Why wear a Nose upon your Face?

And since Pythagoras is mute

on Sex Hygiene and Cosmic Law,

Is your Blonde Beast as Bland a Brute,

As Blind a Brute, as Bernard Shaw?

No doubt, when drilling through the parks,

With Ibsen's Ghost and Old Doc Marx,

You've often seen two Golden Souls

Drink Suds and Sobs from Crystal Bowls?"

"I ain't,"he says,"I ain't, Old Kid,

And I would pinch'em if I did!"

"Thank God,"I said,"for this, at least:

The world, in spots, is well policed!"