expresses absolute truth from even her own point
of view. The verses present the moods, misconceptions, extravagances,
revulsions, reveries--all the obscure crises whereby she reaches a state
of illumination and reconciliation regarding the enigma of love as it is,
making her transition from the purely romantic and ascetic ideal
fostered by the exquisitely selective conspiracies of the art of the great
love-poets, through a great darkness of disillusion, to a new vision
infinitely stronger and sweeter, because unafraid of the whole truth.

Fiammetta is frankly an enthusiast of the things of art; and her
meditations unfortunately betray the fact that Etruscan mirrors are as
dear to her as the daisies, and that she cannot find it more virtuous to
contemplate a few cows in a pasture than a group of Leonardo's people
in their rock-bound cloisters. For the long miracle of the human soul
and its expression is for her not less sacredly part of the universal
process than the wheeling of suns and planets: a Greek vase is to her as
intimately concerned with Nature as the growing corn--with that Nature
who formed the swan and the peacock for decorative delight, and who
puts ivory and ebony cunningly together on the blackthorn every
patterned Spring.

The Shaksperean form of sonnet yields most readily the piercing
quality of sound that helps to describe a malady of the soul. But the
system of completed quatrains in that model suits more assured and
dominating passion than the present matter provides. A more agitated
hurry of the syllables, a more involved sentence-structure, sometimes a
fainter rime-stress, seem necessary to the music of bewilderment.

CONTENTS

THE PROLOGUE OF THE DREAMING WOMEN.
I. THE PRELUDE
II. PERILS.
III. THE PEACE TO BE.
IV. STATUES.
V. THE WEDDING-GARMENT.
VI. THE DEATH OF PROCRIS.
VII. THE WARNING.
VIII. THE ACCUSATION.
IX. THE MEDIAEVAL MIRROR-CASES (1).
X. THE MIRROR-CASES (2).
XI. THE PASSION-FLOWER.
XII. THE VOICE OF LOVE (1).
XIII. THE VOICE OF LOVE (2).
XIV. DREAM-GHOSTS.
XV. MEMORIA SUBMERSA.
XVI. A PORTRAIT BY VENEZIANO.
XVII. THE ENIGMA.
XVIII. THE DOUBT.
XIX. THE SEEKER.
XX. THE HIDDEN REVERIE.
XXI. SOUL AND BODY (1).
XXII. SOUL AND BODY (2).
XXIII. THE JUSTIFICATION.
XXIV. ASPIRATIONS.
XXV. THE ANAESTHETIC.