“We are grown old— Eh, John?” he said. “And, by the Rood! ’Tis time we were at peace with God Who are not long for this world.”
“Yea,” I answered; “we are old.” And then, Remembering that April day At Calais, and that hawthorn field Wherein we fought long since, I said: “We are friends now.”
And she sate by, Scarce heeding. Thus the evening sped.
And we ride homeward now, and I Ride moodily; my palfrey jogs Along a rock-strewn way the moon Lights up for us; yonder the bogs Are curdled with thin ice; the trees Are naked; from the barren wold The wind comes like a blade aslant Across a world grown very old.
(Nicholas) Vachel Lindsay was born in the house where he still lives in Springfield, Illinois, November 10, 1879. His home is next door to the Executive mansion of the State of Illinois; from the window where Lindsay does most of his writing, he saw many Governors come and go, including the martyred John P. Altgeld, whom he has celebrated in one of his finest poems. He graduated from the Springfield High School, attended Hiram College (1897-1900), studied at the Art Institute at Chicago (1900-3) and at the New York School of Art (1904). After two years of lecturing and settlement work, he took the first of his long tramps, walking through Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, preaching “the gospel of beauty,” and formulating his unique plans for a communal art. (See Preface.) During the following five years, Lindsay made several of these trips, travelling as a combination missionary and minstrel. Like a true revivalist, he attempted to wake in the people he met, a response to beauty; like Tommy Tucker, he sang, recited and chanted for his supper, distributing a little pamphlet entitled “Rhymes to be Traded for Bread.”
Lindsay began to create more poetry to reach the public—all of his verse being written in his rôle of apostle. He was, primarily, a rhyming John the Baptist singing to convert the heathen, to stimulate and encourage the half-hearted dreams that hide and are lost in our sordid villages and townships. But the great audiences he was endeavoring to reach did not hear him, even though his collection _General Booth Enters Into Heaven_ (1913) struck many a loud and racy note.