Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/462

Rh life in Bangor after her marriage were very fruitful years. Notwithstanding the cares of her home and of the eight little ones who came to gladden it (four of them living, to go with her to the Californian home), she was still an indefatigable student. Her vocation as poet was to her, as Mrs. Browning had said of her own calling long before, "a serious thing." Everything that could contribute to the enrichment and tlignity of her poetry was made to yield ^ts revenues: classic story and local legend alike were woven into it. She was constantly seek- ing its betterment and continually increasing the stores of knowledge and association which should enhance its charm.

Mrs. Mace's work is very strongly localized. Indeed, by far the best known and best loved of her poems have their roots deep in home soil. Her sweetest lyrics are those which crystallize some intimate experience or associution of her own. Choice as is the workmanship of her longer and more studied poems, it is the slighter and more spontaneous ones that win and hold the affection.

This is strikingly evident in her first volume, "Legends, Lyrics, and Sonnets," published in 1883. The tenderness, the serenity, the satisfied affection, the moral and spiritual elevation of the.se poems, impress one throughout the book. All the loves her life had known, with all the fruition of them, are garnered in this little gray-garbed volume; and her fame would have been secure in it had she never written more.

Although this collection includes some of the most spontaneous of her minor verse, and though it is by these lyrics rather than by her longer poems that she is most lovingly remembered, the book held, too, work that conunanded the attention of the wider and more critical world outside her immediate circle of friends or her accvistomed readers. "Israfil," one of the longest and most finished poems in the volume, was published in Harper s Magazine in 1877. It is one of the strongest and stateliest of her poems, and is instinct with a profound and in- sistent faith. Many of the poems in this and in the succeeding volume were suggested by the scenery and associations of the Mount Desert region, and will link her fame with its own.

In this volume are printed the well-known verses, "Only Waiting." This tender lyric was written when she was a girl of eighteen, and was first published in 1854 in the Waterville Mail, appearing with the signature "Inez." It has since been printed in many hooks of sacred song. That it travelled far and touched many hearts is shown by the fact that Mrs. Mace re- ceived letters of gratitude for its consolation from every State and Territory in the Union. Despite the irrefragable proofs that attest her own writing, her claim to its authorship was at one time disputed. It is pleasant to know that Dr. James Martineau, having included "Only Waiting" in his " Hynms of Praise and Prayer," gave her, in the second edition, credit for it, and wrote Mrs. Mace a most cordial letter of ajjpreciation.

A second volume of poems was published in 1887, with the title, " Under Pine ami Palm." These verses are of great sweetness and pathos. The lines of dedication, in which she say.s — with a touching allusion to a haltit of her girlhood, that of turning at once to her nearest and dear- est ones with each "poem as it was completed — she comes to

" Read once more My latest verse to those who loved me first,"

are exceedingly graceful and tender. And only a little less wistful are "The Woods of Maine," from which we make quotation here:—