feeling; and, secondly, in the meditations of her blank verse, a measure which seems more adapted to her genius than that of any other woman of our time. Her handling of it is, in fact, unmistakable; it is but just to say that she is at her best in the stateliest, simplest and most difficult form of English verse. With its varied pauses, intervals and majestic cadence, it can be sustained only by the uplifting power of coefficient thought and diction. The slightest weakness at once betrays an incompetency. Nearly a score of these poems in blank verse, occupying a third of the volume, are of an even standard. The style is Mrs. Stoddard's own, differing from that of her husband-himself a master of the unrhymed pentameter -in the caesural method, and through its simpler limits of diction. The mental tone is fraught with the recognition of the mystery and transitoriness of things, but rises to content with a law that must be just and beneficent, because it is universal. A single poem of the series will show the pathos and beauty of her more impassioned utterance, and the discipline through which her genius has been matured.

UNRETURNING

Now all the flowers that ornament the grass,
Wherever meadows are and placid brooks,
Must fall-the "glory of the grass" must fall,
Year after year I see them sprout and spread—
The golden, glossy, tossing buttercups,
The tall, straight daisies and red clover globes,
The swinging bellwort and the blue-eyed bent,

With nameless plants as perfect in their hues—
Perfect in root and branch their plan of life,
As if the intention of a soul were there;
I see them flourish as I see them fall!

But he, who once was growing with the grass,
And blooming with the flowers, my little son,
Fell, withered-dead, nor has revived again!
Perfect and lovely, needful to my sight,

Why comes he not to ornament my days?
The barren fields forget that barrenness.

The soulless earth mates with these soulless things, Why should I not obtain my recompense?

The budding spring should bring, or summer's prime,
At least a vision of the vanished child,

And let his heart commune with mine again,
Though in a dream-his life was but a dream;
Then might I wait with patient cheerfulness-
That cheerfulness which keeps one's tears unshed,
And blinds the eyes with pain-the passage slow
Of other seasons, and be still and cold

As the earth is when shrouded in the snow,
Or passive, like it, when the boughs are stripped
In autumn, and the leaves roll everywhere.

And he should go again; for winter's snows,
And autumn's melancholy voice, in winds,
In waters, and in woods, belong to me,
To me a faded soul; for, as I said,
The sense of all his beauty, sweetness, comes
When blossoms are the sweetest; when the sea,
Sparkling and blue, cries to the sun in joy,
Or, silent, pale and misty waits the night,
Till the moon, pushing through the veiling cloud,
Hangs naked in its heaving solitude;

When feathery pines wave up and down the shore,

And the vast deep above holds gentle stars,
And the vast world beneath hides him from me!

A Seaside Idyl," "The Chimney-Swallow's Idyl” and "The Visitings of Truth" display Mrs. Stoddard's command of nature's themes. Her shorter blank-verse poems have a quality kindred to that of Emerson's " Days" and and "The Snowstorm "; and of her lyrics, the lines entitled "Why" might almost be ascribed to the Concord sage. Two other poems, unrhymed-" As One" and "No Answer "-with idyllic refrains, are successful in the isometric fashion of the Syracusan eclogues, practised also by Tennyson in the unrhymed songs of "The Princess" and the Idyls of the King."

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The issue of this volume calls to mind the years in which its author and her husband have lived and worked together, wedded poets, whose respective utterances, far removed from interlikeness, are yet in touching and absolute accord. Mrs. Stoddard's art, to conclude, is that of one who, if she did not "lisp in numbers," found the need of them in the joy and sorrow of her womanhood, and has kept silent except when moved by that stress of feeling which contents itself with no petty or ignoble strain.

XIII

STODDARD'S LAST POEM1

THRENODY

Early or late, come when it will,
At midnight or at noon,
Promise of good, or threat of ill,
Death always comes too soon.
To the child who is too young to know,
(Pray heaven he never may!)

This life of ours is more than play,—

A debt contracted long ago

Which he perforce must pay;

And the man whose head is gray,

And sad, is fain to borrow,

Albeit with added pain and sorrow,

The comfort of delay;

Only let him live to-day

There will be time to die to-morrow!
Now there is not an hour to spare,
Under the uncertain sky,

Save to pluck roses for the hair
Of the loving and the fair,
And the kisses following these,

Like a swarming hive of bees

That soar on high,

Till, drunken with their own sweet wine, They fall and die.

1 Putnam's Monthly and The Critic, October, 1906.

THI

When dear words have all been said
And bright eyes no longer shine
(Ah, not thine!)

Close these weary eyes of mine,
And bear me to the lonely bed
Where unhonored I shall lie,
While the tardy years go by,
Without question or reply
From the long-forgotten dead.

HIS threnody proved to be the swan-song of its author of the old minstrel who in his springtime had made the early volumes of this magazine tuneful with a unique succession of ballads, songs, and graver poems. If, as Shelley says, "We begin in what we end," it is fitting that this poem, his wife's requiem and his own, should be enshrined in the first new number of a periodical in which his gift attained maturity and secured for him, notwithstanding the oldtime rule of anonymity, a repute that justified his adoption of authorship as a profession.

The lyric now printed for the first time was the only one perfected from many broken cadences which came to him in the final year of his life. It was composed while his wife, Elizabeth Stoddard (older than himself), was plainly nearing her end. She died in her eightieth year, August 1, 1902: the eleventh day after the date affixed to the poem. Eleven months before, the wedded poets had lost their only son, Lorimer-author of poems, pictures, and successful dramas,—and Mr. Stoddard had borne up under the affliction less stoically than his wife; for a time seeming dazed, and having illusions that were intensified