498 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
THE EVERLASTING VOICES. 
“O sweet everlasting voices be still; 
Go to the guards of the heavenly fold 
And bid them wander obeying your will 
Flame under flame, till Time be no more; 
Have you not heard that our hearts are old, 
That you call in birds, in wind on the hill, 
In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore ? 
O sweet everlasting Voices be still.”’ 
DUST. 
“T heard them in their sadness say 
‘The earth rebukes the thought of God; 
We are but embers wrapped in clay 
A little nobler than the sod.’ 
But I have touched the lips of clay: 
Mother, thy rudest sod to me 
Is thrilled with fire of hidden day, 
And haunted by all mystery.” 
For the pomp of circumstance and the shocks and the material 
reality of the world we turn away from these mystics to the work of 
Gibson and Masefield. The two names are sufficient to indicate the 
trend of their group. Their subject matter is all the smelly detail 
of a ship at sea, the curses of a poacher’s fight or the whirring of wheels 
in a factory and the poverty of the poor. These men are called realists . 
The word is used unfortunately, for the mystic deals in realism just 
as much as does the realist. But the word is a convenient one. 
When we use it I suppose we pay tribute to an old philosophic theory 
and mean that such and such a man is a realist because he deals in 
“matters of fact,” in materially real terms. Especially if he deals with 
poverty and danger and vice is he a realist because those things are 
our most patent matters of fact in a yet unregenerate social order. 
The realists are performing a necessary function for us to-day. They 
are revealing tous many things. They are really doing what Elizabeth 
Barrett Browning is reported to have done from her languishing 
chair in her “Cry of the Children.” To-day, because we live in a 
more tremendous and shocking age, our modern champions of the 
soul must be tremendous and shocking. A perusal of their pages will 
extricate for us and deliver into our hands much that was otherwise 
unknown, much that it is well for one to know who is possessed of a 
citizen’s soul. 
