Chapter I: Front Matter

FREEDOM, TRUTH AND BEAUTY

SONNETS BY EDWARD DOYLE

Author of Cagliostro, Moody Moments, the American Soldier, the Haunted Temple and other poems; The Comet, a play of our times and Genevra, a play of Mediaeval Florence.

"He owns only his mental vision. But this is clear and broad of
range--as broad, indeed, as that of Dante, Milton and Goethe,
sweeping beyond the horizon of eschatology and mounting, like
Francis Thompson's, even to the Throne of Grace itself when the
theme demands reverential daring."

--STANDARD AND TIMES, PHILADELPHIA.

MANHATTAN AND BRONX ADVOCATE
1712 Amsterdam Avenue, New York.

THE SECOND REVISED EDITION

_Copyright, 1921_
BY
EDWARD DOYLE

CONTENTS

PAGE NO.

The Quality of Edward Doyle's Work, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox 7
True Nationalism, by David Klein, Ph.D. 9
Genevra, Review In the Independent 12
Dedication to the Daughters of the American Revolution 13
The Proem 19
The Atlantic 20
Human Freedom 20
The Stars 21
The Genesis of Freedom 21
The Pilgrim Fathers 23
Plymouth Rock 23
The Catholics in Maryland 24
A Forest for the King's Hawks 24
To Arms Shouts Freedom 25
British Soldiery 25
Amphibious Barry 26
Freedom's Triumph 26
Washington's Army and Barry's Navy 27
The Sunken Continent 27
Elisha Brown 28
Evacuation Day 28
Manhatta 29
The Burning of Washington City by the British 29
The Land of the Great Spirit 30
The Blight to Spring 30
The Scorn of Human Rights 31
Not This Our Country's Glory 31
America's Glory No Fugitive 32
Hate Thou Not Any Man 33
The Celtic Soul Cry 34
British Glory in Kipling's Boots 36
To the English People 36
Shakespeare 37
England's Righteousness 37
The Massacre of the Welsh Miners 38
A Dirty Work 38
Human Nature 39
Our Country--Soul and Character 39
Juda and Erin 41
The Easter Rising in Ireland 41
The Fight in Ireland 42
To Erin 42
The Queen of Beauty 43
Liberty the Light to Peace 43
Why Play with Words, England 44
Freedom's Wardens 44
List to Demosthenes, If Not to Hearst 45
Caledonia 45
Canada 47
Dragon Incursions 51
All Stars Merged in One 52
Nemesis 52
Lincoln's Lightening in Wilson's Hands 53
The Cataclysm 54
An Epoch's Angel Fall 54
The America of the Future 55
The Inevitable 56
Reptiles with Wings 57
The Outlaws in Our Country 58
The Press 59
The Truth 59
Our Lord's Last Prayer 60
Thought Is Truth's Echo 60
Heaven 61
Humility 61
The Night of Mysteries 62
What the Poets Show 62
The Soul's Ascension 63
Lyric Transport 63
The Sunrise 64
Two Darknesses 64
The Doom of Hate 65
The Evil in the World 65
The Earth Renewed by Memory 66
In the Dimple of Beauty's Cheek 66
The Camp Fire 67
Mother 67
In Heaven No Heart Still Heaves 68
Saint Peter's Cathedral in Rome 68
My Bugler Boy 69
Kaiser, Beware 69
Woman in Germany 70
O Thou Pale Moon 70
The Tiger 71
To Our Boys "Over There" 71
The Profiteers 72
Why the Stars Laugh 72
Prayer for the World Peace 73
Religion 73
The Golden Jubilee of Sisters of Charity 74
Winifred Holt, the Lifesaver of the Blind 75
A Choice 75
All Luminaires Have One Trend 76
Life Takes Morning Hues with the Arts of Peace 76
U. S. Senator James A. O. Gorman and the Stalwarts 77
Minister of Justice Palmer, A Bastile Builder 77
A Speck, But Not a Stain, Harvard 78
Supreme Court Justice Charles L. Guy 78
Rear Admiral Sims 79
Saint George and the Dragon 79

THE QUALITY OF THE WORKS OF EDWARD DOYLE

The quality of Edward Doyle's work was appraised by Ella Wheeler Wilcox in the following article by Mrs. Wilcox which appeared in the New York Evening Journal and the San Francisco _Examiner_, in 1905:

Shut your eyes and bind them with a black cloth and try for one hour to see how cheerful you can be. Then imagine yourself deprived for life of the light of day.

Perhaps this experiment will make you less rebellious with your present lot.

Then take the little book called "The Haunted Temple and Other Poems," by Edward Doyle, the blind poet of Harlem, and read and wonder and feel ashamed of any mood of distrust of God and discontent with life you have ever indulged.

Mr. Doyle has been blind for the last thirty-seven years; he has lived a half century.

Therefore he still remembers the privilege of seeing God's world when a lad, and this must augment rather than ameliorate his sorrow.

He who has never known the use of eyes cannot fully understand the immensity of the loss of sight.

I hear people in possession of all their senses, and with many blessings, bewail the fact that they were ever born.

They have missed some aim, failed of some cherished ambition, lost some special joy or been defeated in some purpose.

A GREAT SOUL

And so they sit in spiritual darkness and curse life and doubt God. But here is a great soul who has found his divine self in the darkness and who sends out this wonderful song of joy and gratitude.

Read it, oh, ye weak repiners, and read it again and again. It is beautiful in thought, perfect in expression and glorious with truth.

CHIME, DARK BELL

My life is in deep darkness; still, I cry,
With joy to my Creator, "It is well!"
Were worlds my words, what firmaments would tell
My transport at the consciousness that I
Who was not, Am! To be--oh, that is why
The awful convex dark in which I dwell
Is tongued with joy, and chimes a temple bell.
Antiphonally to the choirs on high!
Chime cheerily, dark bell! for were no more
Than consciousness my gift, this were to know
The Giver Good--which sums up all the lore
Eternity can possibly bestow.
Chime! for thy metal is the molten ore
Of the great stars, and marks no wreck below.

I know a gifted and brilliant man in New York who is full of charm and wit in conversation, but the moment he touches a pen he becomes, as a rule, a melancholy pessimist, crying out at the injustice of the world and the uselessness of high endeavor in the field of art.

When urged to take a different mental attitude for the sake of the reading world, which needs strong tonics of hope and courage, rather than the slow poison of pessimism, however subtly sweet the brew, my friend responds that "The song and dance of literature is not my special gift." And he is obliged to "speak of the world as I find it."

He is an able-bodied man, in the prime of life, with splendid years waiting on his threshold to lead him to any height he may wish to climb. But to his mental vision, nothing is really "worth while."

What a rebuke this wonderful poem of Edward Doyle's should be to all such men and women. What an inspiration it should be to every mortal who reads it, to look within, and find the =Kingdom of God= as this blind poet has found it.

Mr. Doyle was in St. Francis Xavier's College when his great affliction fell upon him. He started a local paper, The Advocate, in Harlem twenty-three years ago and has in the darkness of his physical vision developed his poetical talent and given the world some great lines.

AN INSPIRATION

Here is a poem which throbs with the keen anguish which must have been his guest through many silent hours of these thirty-seven years:

TO A CHILD READING

My darling, spell the words out. You may creep
Across the syllables on hands and knees,
And stumble often, yet pass me with ease
And reach the spring upon the summit steep.
Oh, I could lay me down, dear child, and weep
These charr'd orbs out, but that you then might cease
Your upward effort, and with inquiries
Stoop down and probe my heart too deep, too deep!
I thirst for Knowledge. Oh, for an endless drink
Your goblet leaks the whole way from the spring--
No matter, to its rim a few drops cling,
And these refresh me with the joy to think
That you, my darling, have the morning's wing
To cross the mountain at whose base I sink.

But Edward Doyle has not sunk "at the mountain's base." He is far up its summit, and he will go higher. He has found God, and nothing can hinder his flight. He is an inspiration to all struggling, toiling souls on earth.

As I read his book, with its strong clarion cry of faith and joy and courage, and ponder over the carefully finished thoughts and beautifully polished lines, I feel ashamed of my own small achievements, and am inspired to new efforts.

Glory and success to you, Edward Doyle.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX.

TRUE NATIONALISM

(_From the "Maccabaein", June, 1920._)

THE JEWS IN RUSSIA

From town and village to a wood, stript bare,
As they of their possessions, see them throng.
Above them grows a cloud; it moves along,
As flee they from the circling wolf pack's glare.
Is it their Brocken-Shadow of despair,
The looming of their life of cruel wrong
For countless ages? No; their faith is strong
In their Jehovah; that huge cloud is prayer.

A flash of light, and black the despot lies.
What thunder round the world! 'Tis transport's strain
Proclaiming loud: "No righteous prayer is vain
No God-imploring tears are lost; they rise
Into a cloud, and in the sky remain
Till they draw lightening from Jehovah's eyes."

The author of this superb little gem, like Homer, is blind; but, like Homer, his mental vision is clear, and broad, and deep. President Schurman, of Cornell University, commenting on Doyle once said: "It is as true today as of yore that the genuine poet, even though blind, is the Seer and Prophet of his generation." The poem here printed illustrates the point. Did we not know that it was published some fifteen years ago in a volume entitled "The Haunted Temple," we should assume that it was written on the occasion of the fall of the Czar. In fact, however, it merely foretells this event by some dozen years. And how terribly applicable are the lines to the facts of today! The prophecy is one capable of repeated fulfillment.

But it is as a prophet of nationalism that this man compels our particular attention. The prophecy is embodied in a play entitled "The Comet, a Play of Our Times," brought out as far back as 1908. The play is a microcosm of American life. The chief character is a college president, and he it is that is chosen to expound the true nature of nationalism and to give voice and utterance to the principle of self-determination. (Is it merely a coincidence that at that time Woodrow Wilson was President of Princeton, or is it a case of poetic vision. Wilson, be it remembered, was already a national figure, and there were already glimmerings that he was destined to usher in a new era in politics.) According to the protagonist, America is not "a boiling cauldron in which the elements seethe, but never settle," but rather a college where every class is taught to translate--

"Into the common speech of daily life
The country's loftiest ideals--"

and any body of citizens form a part of our republic only in so far--

"As they contribute to its character
As leader of the nations unto Right
By thought or deed, in service for mankind."

We must lead the peoples of the world to freedom. And what is freedom?

"'Tis intelligence
Aloof from harm and hamper, grandly circling
Its native sun-lit peaks, the highest hopes
Heaved from the heart of man upon the earth,
In ranges long as time and soul endure."

What, then, is America's duty to the oppressed race or the small nation? It is to "wake and disabuse it of false hope"--

"and urge it on
To the development of its own powers,
The culmination of its own ideals,
The star seed sown by God,--the only means
By which a tribe can thrive to its perfection."

To make this possible, civilization must be given a more human content. It is therefore necessary to awake human intelligence, "the godlike genius," to a realization of the fact--

"--that, on having brought
This world from out the chaos dark
Of waters and of woody wilderness,
And shaped it into hills of hope for man,
Must providence its beautiful creation
With altruistic love and tenderness;
So that all tribes of man, what'er their hue,
Have each a hill where it can touch the star
That it has followed with its mental growth."

Such a program is rendered imperative by the inexorability of the law of race, which nullifies any attempts to force assimilation:

"It is a foolish, futile thing
To try to shape society by codes,
Vetoed by Nature. Nature trumpets forth
No edict, through the instinct of a race,
Proclaiming certain territory hers
And warning all encroaching powers therefrom,
Without the ordering out of her reserves
To see to it the edict is enforced.
Let politics keep off forbidden shores."

If any powers preserve in a policy of oppression, our duty is plain:

"To teach the barbarous tribes throughout the globe,
Christian or Turk, that all humanity
Is territory sheltered by our flag;
That butchery must cease throughout the world;
That, having ended human slavery,
Old glory has a mission from on high
To stop the slaughter of the smiling babe,
The pale, crazed mother, weak, defenseless sire,
All places on the habitable globe."

Finally to render feasible the ideal development of all peoples, and put an end to war, America must bring about a league of all nations. It develops on us--

"To get the races by degrees together
To talk their grievance over, in a voice
As gentle as a woman's....
There is no education in the world
Like human contact for mankind's advance;
All differences, then, adjust themselves;
But when two races are estranged by hate,
They grow so deaf to one another's rights,
That it soon comes to pass that either has
To use the trumpet of artillery
In order to be heard at all."

Recently, Doyle wrote the following lines. Their application is obvious:

"Vault Godward, Poet. What though few may climb
The mountain and the star on trail of thee?
Thy wing-flash beams toward man, and if it be
True inspiration--whether thought sublime,
Or fervor for the truth, or liberty--
Thy light will reach the earth in goodly time."

What wonder that from so lofty an outlook his searching eye should pierce the tragedy of "The Jews in Russia"--or elsewhere--should pierce even the revenges that Time would ring in, and rest on a vision of righteous peace!

DAVID KLEIN, Ph.D.

_AUTHOR OF LITERARY CRITICISM, from the Elizabethian Dramatist._

GENEVRA

(_From the "Independent," May 30, 1912._)

The scene of Mr. Edward Doyle's new play is the Florence of 1400; the atmosphere that of a plague stricken city in a time when man was helpless, authorities hopeless, social life in shreds and patches. The plot of the play founded on this state of affairs is rich in incident, varied and sufficiently complex in color, passion and character to furnish material for an exciting spectacular representation. The tragic element is strong, but supported and shaded by the company of roysterers, a jester, whose foolery is a compound of bluff of that period and bluff of modern politics and athletics. The jester, the black company and the penitents, together with the roysterers, form now the foreground, now the background, of action, which in itself is never without the dolorous sound of the death bell. The doomed city is under a spell comparable to that set forth so vividly in Manzoni's "I Promessi Sposi." Says the villain of the plot as he listens from his seat at the festive board:

"It bodes ill for the black Cowled company
To make a visit to a festive house.
'Tis like death looking in and whispering 'Next.'
Fool, call the servants. Bid them fetch the wine--
A cask of it--the best varnaccio!
Here come my friends to help me drown the Plague."

Pictures like this as sharply defined are frequent and throw in shadowed blackening on shadow. The author defends the use of a meteorological phenomenon translated in the spirit of the time as supernatural by quoting Dante as recognizing it, but the authority of Dante was not necessary to justify the dramatist in introducing the "Crimson Cross." It was a part of the pyrotechnics of the church propaganda. Though the advance of scientific discovery has laid a heavy hand on thaumaturgy of the sort, it would no doubt, have its use when properly handled on a modern stage. The action of the drama is rapid and natural, the characters well drawn and individualized, the dialogue spicy, forceful and varied.

Price $1.00.

DEDICATION

TO THE DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

I

What lineage so noble as from Sires,
Laureled by Freedom? For, who, but the brave
Have glory to transmit? The Hero's grave
Blooms ever. It is there the spring retires
To dream to flowers, her heart and soul desires,
When winter's whitening wind, like wash of wave,
Sweeps mauseleums of the skulk and knave
From mounts of glare off to Oblivion's mires.

The bloom, for which mere wealth lacks length of arm,
And fainting Time takes for reviving scent,
Fame, with bright eyes from heart and soul content,
Forms wreaths for Valor's Daughters--crowns that charm
Not with death-smells from Human welfare rent
But breath of Country's rescue from dire harm.