The Poem of the Universe
Nor rhythm has nor rhyme;
Some God recites the wondrous song,
A stanza at a time.
I dwell not now on what may be;
Night shadows o'er the scene;
But still my fancy wanders free
Through that which might have been.
Two stanzas in the poem, the first and the last, reminded me, as did the
lines on "Constancy," of something I had read before. In a moment I had
placed the first as the opening lines of Longfellow's "Children," and a
search through my books showed that the concluding verse was taken bodily
from Peacock's exquisite little poem "Castles in the Air."
Despairing to solve the problem that now confronted me, which was, in
brief, what Bragdon meant by bodily lifting stanzas from the poets and
making them over into mosaics of his own, I turned from the poems and cast
my eyes over some of the bound volumes in the box.
The first of these to come to hand was a copy of _Hamlet_, bound in tree
calf, the sole lettering on the book being on the back, as follows:
HAMLET
Bragdon
New York
This I deemed a harmless bit of vanity, and not necessarily misleading,
since many collectors of books see fit to have their own names emblazoned
on the backs of their literary treasures; but pray imagine my horror upon
opening the volume to discover that the name of William Shakespeare had
been erased from the title-page, and that of Thomas Bragdon so carefully
inserted that except to a practised eye none would ever know that the page
was not as it had always been.
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