wly to take their proper place and give her the rank that
she afterwards held.

For some years now almost everything that she wrote was published in
"Lippincott's Magazine," then edited by John Foster Kirk, and we shall
still find in her poems the method and movement of her life. Nature
is still the fount and mirror, reflecting, and again reflected, in the
soul. We have picture after picture, almost to satiety, until we grow
conscious of a lack of substance and body and of vital play to the
thought, as though the brain were spending itself in dreamings and
reverie, the heart feeding upon itself, and the life choked by its
own fullness without due outlet. Happily, however, the heavy cloud of
sadness has lifted, and we feel the subsidence of waves after a storm.
She sings "Matins:"--

"Does not the morn break thus,
Swift, bright, victorious,
With new skies cleared for us
Over the soul storm-tost?
Her night was long and deep,
Strange visions vexed her sleep,
Strange sorrows bade her weep,
Her faith in dawn was lost.

"No halt, no rest for her,
The immortal wanderer
From sphere to higher sphere
Toward the pure source of day.
The new light shames her fears,
Her faithlessness and tears,
As the new sun appears
To light her god-like way."

Nature is the perpetual resource and consolation. "'T is good to be
alive!" she says, and why? Simply,

"To see the light
That plays upon the grass, to feel (and sigh
With perfect pleasure) the mild breeze stir
Among the garden roses, red and white,
With whiffs of fragrancy."

She gives us the breath of the pines and of the cool, salt seas,
"illimitably sparkling." Her ears drink the ripple of the tide, and she
stops

"To gaze as one who is not satisfied
With gazing at the large, bright, breathing sea."

"Phantasies" (after Robert Schumann) is the most complete and perfect
poem of this period. Like "Epochs," it is a cycle of poems, and the
verse has caught the very trick of music,--alluring, baffling, and
evasive. This time we have the landscape of the night, the glamour