Page:A Foremost American Lyrist, Lippincott's, March 1913.djvu/7

302 leaves upon one, with its fine spiritual eloquence, its etching of nature's hues and forms, is like some vision come to one in sleep with so strong a familiarity that it does not vanish in daylight, but performs its alchemy upon one's experience with the world. How subtly in this poem is the saddened thought of the beloved dead, transfigured into the gladness of promise, with the recurring, eternal return of the abundant season. Elegiac in tone, in poignant substance it becomes a brooding affirmation of life:

In its process of artistic embodiment, poetry shapes itself into symbols that render by suggestion, with a lucidity unmatched, the complex emotions of the individual. Feeling is at the root of all consciousness, and the mind defines feeling, by the selection and grouping of images, in its endeavor to express experiences affecting the spirit, whose inward crises are registered upon the world through physical actions and events. In all vital and beautiful poetry, there is at core the continual functioning of a few of the many truths which in their infinite totality make up the standard of perfection for human life. Through the peculiar temperament of the individual poet, these few truths, by the mystery of some prenatal endowment, are woven into the nature as a divine obligation to be promulgated in the world. His art is the beautiful messenger, but these truths are the messages to which the poet is consecrated by the gift of his art; and through it, manifested and made articulate, in whatever substantive feeling that awakes his dream or inspiration,—full-orbed and glimmering,—are these real but unmaterialized objects given utterance. Always, in my endeavor to disengage the vital substance in poetry, I have tried to show what was the quality of that substance, what particular significance it took, in the thoughtful and lovely lyrical work of Mrs. Coates. To interpret her spirit, with all its delicate and subtle sympathies, touching with unobtrusive but familiar interests all human chords, sounding always a clear but subdued music, has been my purpose, rather than to emphasize the various