CHAPTER V
Percy MacKaye
Poet, dramatist, and pageant-maker is Percy MacKaye, whose work is well worthy of the place it holds in our contemporary American poetry. Here is a man whose work as a dramatist has not imperiled such tuneful lyrics as
Frail Sleep, that blowest by fresh banks
Of quiet, crystal pools, beside whose brink
The varicolored dreams, like cattle, come to drink,
Cool Sleep, thy reeds, in solemn ranks,
That murmur peace to me by midnight’s streams,
At dawn I pluck, and dayward pipe my flock of dreams.
And MacKaye turns with equal ability to the "Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis," presented in Forest Park of that city on five successive days, at each performance of which 150,000 people attended.
The paternal grandfather of Mr. MacKaye came to this country from Scotland about 1800, and his grandfather, Colonel James Morrison MacKaye, a staunch adherent of anti-slavery doctrines, was an intimate friend of Clay, Webster, Garrison, and Lincoln. James Steele MacKaye, his father, was dramatist, theatre director and inventor, writing many successful
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