Even as the illimitable ichor of star-dust, the mysterious Demiurge of the Universe, keeps the suns and planets to their orbitary revolutions, so must environment mark the Fas and Nefas of Genius. Plato's Idea of the Archetypal Man was due, perhaps, as much to the serene weather conditions of Academe as to the marvelous mentality of Plato. What had Job eaten for breakfast that he should have given utterance to his magnificent Lamentation? Was he the discoverer of Human Sorrow or the pioneer of Human Dyspepsia?
It is not altogether radical on my part, then, for me to assert that many of the stylistic peculiarities found in these Sonnets are attributable to the locale of their inspiration the rear platform of a Sixth Avenue car. One can plainly hear the jar and jounce of the elliptical wheels, the cry, "Step lively!" the six o'clock stampede, the lament of the strap-hanging multitude in such lines as these:
"Three days with sad skidoo have came and went, Yet Pansy cometh nix to ride with me. I rubber vainly at the throng to see Her golden locks--gee! such a discontent! Perhaps she's beat it with some soapy gent--"
Where are lines like these to be found in the Italian of Petrarch? Where has Tasso uttered an impassioned confession to resemble this:
"But when I ogle Pansy in the throng My heart turns over twice and rings a gong"?
Of the human or personal record of William Henry Smith very little has been discovered. Looking over the books of the Metropolitan Street Railway I unearthed the following entry:
"Remarks:--Car No. 21144, William Smith, conductor, ran into large brewery truck at So. E. cor. Sixth Ave. It is reported that Smith, to the neglect of his duty, was reading poetry from a book called 'Sonnets of de Heredia' at the time of the accident. Three Italians were slightly injured by the accident, and Ethelbert Pangwyn, an actor starring in 'The Girl and the Idiot,' a musical comedy, was killed."
"Smith was held for manslaughter, but Judge O' Rafferty, who had seen 'The Girl and the Idiot,' discharged the defendant, averring that the killing of Pangwyn did not constitute a crime."
What, then, has become of this minstrel who sang the Minnelieder of the Car-barns? Like Homer, like Omar, like Sappho, like Shakespeare, he is a Voice singing out of the mists. He was but a Name to his employers; and his friends, if he has friends, remember him not. These Sonnets, written neatly on twenty-six violet transfer-slips, were discovered, together with a rejection blank from a leading magazine, in the Dead Letter office. According to the current folk-lore in Harlem and the Bronx, Smith is now living in California employed as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad. Some aver that Pansy fell heiress to a sausage establishment and moved to Italy with her Poet. Still others maintain that Pansy, Gill the Grip and Maxy the Firebug never existed in real life--were merely the mind-children of a Symbolist and a dreamer of dreams.