But the best of her work is incomparable in its strange cadence and quiet intensity. Her verses are like a box of many jewels, sparkling with an unexpected brilliancy.

Emily Dickinson died, in the same place she was born, at Amherst, May 15, 1886.

CHARTLESS

I never saw a moor,

I never saw the sea;

Yet now I know how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in Heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

INDIAN SUMMER

These are the days when birds come back,
A very few, a bird or two,

To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies put on
The old, old sophistries of June,-
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh, fraud that can not cheat the bee,
Almost thy plausibility

Induces my belief,

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear,
And softly through the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf!

Oh, sacrament of summer days,
Oh, last communion in the haze,
Permit a child to join,

Thy sacred emblems to partake,
Thy consecrated bread to break,
Taste thine immortal wine!

SUSPENSE

Elysium is as far as to

The very nearest room,

If in that room a friend await
Felicity or doom.

What fortitude the soul contains,

That it can so endure

The accent of a coming foot,

The opening of a door.

A CEMETERY

This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies, And Lads and Girls;

Was laughter and ability and sighing,

And frocks and curls.

This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion, Where Bloom and Bees

Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit,

Then ceased like these.

BECLOUDED

The sky is low, the clouds are mean,

A travelling flake of snow

Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.

PEDIGREE

The pedigree of honey

Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in 1836 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he spent most of the sixteen years which he has recorded in that delightful memoir, The Story of a Bad Boy (1869). From 1855 to 1866 he held various journalistic positions, associating himself with the leading metropolitan literati. A few years later he became editor of the famous Atlantic Monthly, holding that position from 1881 to 1890.

Aldrich's work falls into two sharply-divided classes. The first half is full of overloaded phrase-making, fervid extravagances. The reader sinks beneath clouds of damask, azure, emerald, pearl and gold; he is drowned in a sea of musk, aloes, tiger-lilies, spice, soft music, orchids, attar-breathing dusks. Too often, Aldrich dwelt in a literary Orientalism; his Cloth of Gold was suffused with "vanilla-flavored adjectives and patchouli-scented participles" (to quote Holmes), laboring hard to create an exotic atmosphere by a wearisome profusion of lotus blossoms, sandalwood, spikenard, blown roses, diaphanous gauzes, etc.

The second phase of Aldrich's art is more human in appeal as it is surer in artistry. "In the little steel engravings that

are the best expressions of his peculiar talent," writes Percy H. Boynton, "there is a fine simplicity; but it is the simplicity of an accomplished woman of the world rather than of a village maid." Although Aldrich bitterly resented the charge that he was a maker of tiny perfections, a carver of cherry-stones, those poems of his which have the best chance of permanence are the short lyrics and a few of the sonnets, exquisite in design. The best of Aldrich's diffuse poetry has been collected in an inclusive Household Edition, published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. He died in 1907.

MEMORY

My mind lets go a thousand things,
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour—
'Twas noon by yonder village tower,
And on the last blue noon in May-
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly

Two petals from that wild-rose tree.

"ENAMORED ARCHITECT OF AIRY RHYME"

Enamored architect of airy rhyme,

Build as thou wilt, heed not what each man says.

Good souls, but innocent of dreamers' ways,

Will come, and marvel why thou wastest time;

Others, beholding how thy turrets climb

'Twixt theirs and heaven, will hate thee all thy days; But most beware of those who come to praise.

O Wondersmith, O worker in sublime

And heaven-sent dreams, let art be all in all;
Build as thou wilt, unspoiled by praise or blame,
Build as thou wilt, and as thy light is given;
Then, if at last the airy structure fall,
Dissolve, and vanish-take thyself no shame.
They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.

John Hay

John Hay was born at Salem, Indiana, in 1838, graduated from Brown University in 1858 and was admitted to the Illinois bar a few years later. He became private secretary to Lincoln, then major and assistant adjutant-general under General Gilmore, then secretary of the Legation at Paris, chargé d'affaires at Vienna and secretary of legation at Madrid.

His few vivid Pike County Ballads came more as a happy accident than as a deliberate creative effort. When Hay returned from Spain in 1870, bringing with him his Castilian Days, he had visions of becoming an orthodox lyric poet. But he found everyone reading Bret Harte's short stories and the new expression of the rude West. (See Preface.) He speculated upon the possibility of doing something similar, translating the characters into poetry. The result was the six racy ballads in a vein utterly different from everything Hay wrote before or after.

Hay was in politics all the later part of his life, ranking as one of the most brilliant Secretaries of State the country has ever had. He died in 1905.

JIM BLUDSO,

OF THE PRAIRIE BELLE

Wall, no! I can't tell whar he lives,
Becase he don't live, you see ;
Leastways, he's got out of the habit
Of livin' like you and me.