and wrote The Titmouse; and in Forbearance, he asks his reading public:
"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?"
But not till the twentieth century is the humane cause consummated in both British and American poetry. In England, Arthur Symons proclaims:
“——When I hear
Crying of oxen, that, in deadly fear,
Rough men, with cruel dogs about them, drive
Into the torture-house of death alive.
How can I sit under a tree and read
A happy idle book, and take no heed?"
Ralph Hodgson defines his attitude toward the world’s unthinking cruelty in his lovely lyric, Stupidity Street:
"I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For the people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.
I saw in vision
The worm in the wheat,
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.”
And again in The Bells of Heaven:
" 'Twould ring the bells of Heaven
The wildest peal for years.
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs,
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers
And dancing dogs and bears.
And wretched, blind pit ponies,
And little hunted hares.”
