"Though doubtless now our shrewd machines

Can blow the world to smithereens

More tidily and so on,

Let's give our ancestors their due.

Their ways were coarse, their weapons few

But ah! how wondrously they slew

With what they had to go on."

While Edith Sitwell renders what is probably the most forceful piece of poetry in her tragic memorial to all war orphans:

"The snow is the blood of these poor Dead...they have no other--

These children, old in dog's scale of years too old

For the hopeless breast--ghosts for whom there is none to care--

Grown fleshless as the skeleton

Of Adam, they have known

More aeons of the cold than he endured

In the first grave of the world..."

Of the other authors represented in the issue it is enough to say that Hemingway remains great, if gruesome, and Thurber gentle, though blind.

The total effect of the journal in which these masters appear is one of awesomeness. They may be old, but they are not dead. The Atlantic's 100th Anniversary Issue is in a way a compilation of the representative thought and writing of the most fluent men and women of our time.

If the thoughts are not new and the writing familiar, it does not speak ill of the occasion or the agency which produced them. A magazine which can summon these people to a command performance can perhaps find the talent to keep up its tradition, and, hopefully, add to it.