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ast between the bustling pettiness of the artificial city of Buffalo and the eternal fresh beauty of Niagara is like Bunyan's vision of the man busy with the muck-rake while over his head stood an angel with a golden crown.
Within the town of Buffalo
Are prosy men with leaden eyes.
Like ants they worry to and fro,
(Important men, in Buffalo).
But only twenty miles away
A deathless glory is at play:
Niagara, Niagara....
Above the town a tiny bird,
A shining speck at sleepy dawn,
Forgets the ant-hill so absurd,
This self-important Buffalo.
Descending twenty miles away
He bathes his wings at break of day--
Niagara, Niagara.
True poet that he is, Vachel Lindsay loves to show the contrast between transient noises that tear the atmosphere to shreds and the eternal beauty of unpretentious melody. After the thunder and the lightning comes the still, small voice. Who ever before thought of comparing the roar of the swiftly passing motor-cars with the sweet singing of the stationary bird? Was there ever in a musical composition a more startling change from fortissimo to pianissimo?
Listen to the iron-horns, ripping, racking,
Listen to the quack-horns, slack and clacking.
Way down the road, trilling like a toad,
Here comes the dice_-horn, here comes the _vice-horn,
Here comes the snarl_-horn, _brawl_-horn, _lewd-horn,
Followed by the prude-horn, bleak and squeaking:--
(Some of them from Kansas, some of them from Kansas)
Here comes the hod_-horn, _plod_-horn, _sod-horn,
Nevermore-to-roam_-horn, _loam_-horn, _home-horn,
(Some of them from Kansas, some of them from Kansas)
Far away the Rachel-Jane Not defeated by the horns, Sings amid a hedge of thorns:-- "Love and life, Eternal youth-- Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, Dew and glory, Love and truth,