Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/179

MRS. STODDARD'S POEMS

And the vast deep above holds gentle stars,

And the vast world beneath hides him from me!

"A Seaside Idyl," "The Chimney-Swallow's Idyl" and "The Visitings of Truth" display Mrs. Stoddard's command of nature's themes. Her shorter blank-verse poems have a quality kindred to that of Emerson's "Days" and "The Snowstorm"; and of her lyrics, the lines entitled "Why" might almost be ascribed to the Concord sage. Two other poems, unrhymed—"As One" and "No Answer"—with idyllic refrains, are successful in the isometric fashion of the Syracusan eclogues, practised also by Tennyson in the unrhymed songs of "The Princess" and the "Idyls of the King."

The issue of this volume calls to mind the years in which its author and her husband have lived and worked together, wedded poets, whose respective utterances, far removed from interlikeness, are yet in touching and absolute accord. Mrs. Stoddard's art, to conclude, is that of one who, if she did not "lisp in numbers," found the need of them in the joy and sorrow of her womanhood, and has kept silent except when moved by that stress of feeling which contents itself with no petty or ignoble strain. [165]