Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/177

MRS. STODDARD'S POEMS feeling; and, secondly, in the meditations of her blank verse, a measure which seems more adapted to her genius than that of any other woman of our time. Her handling of it is, in fact, unmistakable; it is but just to say that she is at her best in the stateliest, simplest and most difficult form of English verse. With its varied pauses, intervals and majestic cadence, it can be sustained only by the uplifting power of coefficient thought and diction. The slightest weakness at once betrays an incompetency. Nearly a score of these poems in blank verse, occupying a third of the volume, are of an even standard. The style is Mrs. Stoddard's own, differing from that of her husband—himself a master of the unrhymed pentameter—in the caesural method, and through its simpler limits of diction. The mental tone is fraught with the recognition of the mystery and transitoriness of things, but rises to content with a law that must be just and beneficent, because it is universal. A single poem of the series will show the pathos and beauty of her more impassioned utterance, and the discipline through which her genius has been matured.

UNRETURNING

Now all the flowers that ornament the grass,

Wherever meadows are and placid brooks,

Must fall—the "glory of the grass" must fall,

Year after year I see them sprout and spread—

The golden, glossy, tossing buttercups,

The tall, straight daisies and red clover globes,

The swinging bellwort and the blue-eyed bent,

[163]