WHEN PIPPA PASSED
from him. She sat there, remote as her cold pearls, as far from the rough, sweet uses of the world as the priceless china in her cabinets.
"Oh, yes, of course, there is religion," he answered listlessly.
Two days later they sat, all three, in her library, while West read them his poems. The two looked at each other in amazement. Where had this untrained factory boy got it all? What wonderful voices had sung to him above the whirring of the wheels; what delicate visions had risen through the smoky pall of his sordid days? He wrote only of Nature: the brown brook water in spring; the pale, hurrying leaves of November; a bird glimpsed through pink apple-blossoms; the full river encircling a bending elm. In the vivid swiftness of effect, the simple subtlety of treatment, there was a recalling of the Japanese witchery of suggestion; the faint tinge of sadness in every poem left in the mind precisely the sweet regret that the beauty of the world must always leave. At the "Clearing Shower," perhaps the most compelling of all his work, quick drops started to the
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