The skies lay like pale-watered deep. The moon's slow wonder with her hand. Hilda Conkling Hilda Conkling, most gifted of recent infant prodigies, was born at Catskill-on-Hudson, New York, October 8, 1910. The daughter of Grace Hazard Conkling (see page 124), she came to Northampton, Massachusetts, with her mother when she was three years old and has lived there ever since. Hilda began to write poems-or rather, to talk them-at the age of four. Since that time, she has created one hundred and fifty little verses, many of them astonishing in exactness of phrase and beauty of vision. Poems by a Little Girl (1920), published when Hilda was a little more than nine years old, is a detailed proof of this unaffected originality; "Water," "Hay-Cock," and a dozen others are startling in their precision and a power of painting the familiar in unsuspected colors. She hears a chickadee talking The way smooth bright pebbles Drop into water. The rooster's comb is "gay as a parade"; he has "pearl trinkets on his feet" and The short feathers smooth along his back Are the dark color of wet rocks, Or the rippled green of ships When I look at their sides through water. Everything is extraordinarily vivid and fanciful to the keen senses of this child. WATER The world turns softly Not to spill its lakes and rivers. The water is held in its arms And the sky is held in the water. What is water, And can hold the sky? HAY-COCK This is another kind of sweetness This is the hive the bees have left, They took away the honey I KEEP WONDERING I saw a mountain, And he was like Wotan looking at himself in the water. I saw a cockatoo, And he was like sunset clouds. Even leaves and little stones Are different to my eyes sometimes. I keep wondering through and through my heart Where all the beautiful things in the world Come from. And while I wonder They go on being beautiful. PREFACE THE END OF VICTORIANISM The age commonly called Victorian came to an end in England about 1885. It was an age distinguished by many true idealists and many false ideals. It was, in spite of its notable artists, on an entirely different level from the epoch which had preceded it. Its poetry was, in the main, not universal but parochial; its romanticism was gilt and tinsel; its realism was as cheap as its showy glass pendants, red plush, parlor chromos and antimacassars. The period was full of a pessimistic resignation (the note popularized by Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam) and a kind of negation which, refusing to see any glamour in the actual world, turned to the Middle Ages, to King Arthur, to the legend of Troy-to the suave surroundings of a dream-world instead of the hard contours of actual experience. The poets of a generation before this time were fired with such ideas as freedom, a deep and burning awe of nature, an insatiable hunger for truth in all its forms and manifestations. The characteristic but by no means the best poets of the Victorian Era, says Max Plowman, "wrote under the dominance of churchliness, of 'sweetness and light,' and a thousand lesser theories that have not Truth but comfort for their end." The revolt against this and the tawdriness of the period had already begun; the best of Victorianism can be found. not in men who were typically Victorian, but in pioneers like Browning and writers like Swinburne, Rossetti, |