"For there is a flame that has blown too near,
And there is a name that has grown too dear,
And there is a fear . . .'

And to the still hills and cool earth and far sky
I made moan,

"The heart in my bosom is not my own!

'O would I were free as the wind on the wing;
Love is a terrible thing!""

This is an admirable poem, not only because of its sincerity, but because it is a rare combination of lyrical rhythm with the cadences of natural speech.

In her poem, "Homage," Helen Hoyt speaks with reverence. This stanza is a clue to the meaning of the whole:

"Not to myself, I knew, belonged your homage:
I but the vessel of your holy drinking,

The channel to you of that olden wonder

Of love and womanhood,-I but a woman."

Preeminent among living women who have written love songs with competent sincerity, is Sara Teasdale. Her philosophy of poetry is a philosophy of absolute fidelity to the truth as it is felt. She believes that poets who will report themselves truly to the world can hardly fail, if they be poets in any real sense, to give the world poetry of unquestioned excellence. She believes that the worst of all artistic immoralities is to say in a lyric what has not been felt in the heart. The statements made in it may be fancy or fiction, but the thing that is felt in it,— that must be true. Otherwise it can not have that certain and insistent quality which claims the allegiance of mankind and makes it not only unique but universal.

Sara Teasdale has been true to this philosophy. She has been emotionally honest. She has keenly felt things that all women feel and she has given her emotions a true form and significance. Therefore her little songs, with their often wistful and sometimes exultant beauty, are now cherished by lovers of poetry wherever English is spoken. And, although her work has only been in

general circulation for about ten years, many of her poems have been translated into other languages.

It is not too much to claim that her best lyrics have the indefinable manner which belongs to poetry that lives.

Her earlier poems express a whimsical coquetry that is delightfully feminine, and rich in the innocent, inherited wisdom of girlhood. This coquetry gives charm to such songs as "Four Winds," in which she says,

"When thou art more cruel than he,

Then will love be kind to thee."

The same coquetry is in the refrain of "The Flight."

"But what if I heard my first love calling me once more?"

It persists with pleasing insouciance in two little quatrains called "Love Me," and in two others that make a poem called "The Look." It is an essential part of the delicate pathos of "The Song for Colin":

"Pierrot laid down his lute to weep,

And sighed, 'She sings for me.'
But Colin slept a careless sleep
Beneath an apple tree."

In poems written a little later we find much more than this coquetry in the revelation of girlhood. The inward reaching of a woman's spirit toward that which she does not yet know, the mystical and undefined longing for fulfillment, like the longing of the branch for bud and blossom, these also she has expressed in her poems, "Twilight," "A Winter Night," "Spring Night,” and others. In "Spring Night," especially, the mood is exquisitely expressed.

"Why am I crying after love

With youth, a singing voice, and eyes

To take earth's wonder by surprise?"

If this were all, it would not be enough. But it is the smallest part of the beauty of her work. Her poems of the

finding of love never lack warmth and dignity. They are never purely "literary." They never stagger through sloughs of metrical sentimentality. They are clean and simple. And, if they lack the elemental vigor that has thrilled and shaken our spirits in the best love poetry written by men, they keep always a certain glowing depth which is a part of the constancy of the love of women.

Nor is it possible for a critic to refrain from mentioning her beautiful craftsmanship. She gives us melodies that are quiet, cool, sweet-flowing, of one kind with her emotion, the appropriate accompaniment of her meanings. They are always varied so that they avoid monotony. She chooses for her poems such symbols and images as are natural and relevant, avoiding all that is striking and sensational. She is never that most deplorable of all pseudo-artists, the clever poet. And she is never trite, for all of her poems are the result of personal realization. She uses language without affectation, language simple enough for great and venerable uses. Her poems reëcho in us because we can not fail to know at once just what they mean. They have a very remarkable clarity.

Perhaps her song, "I Would Live In Your Love," brings her as near as any of her lyrics to the ancient racial significance of the love of woman for man. It is short, poignant, perfect ac'cording to its kind. In it, as in all of her finest poems, she uses a single symbol to carry the weight of the thought. Anyone who knows the sea has watched the rise and fall of the sea-grasses, lifted and flattened out alternately by the flowing and ebbing of waves. That is the symbol of a woman's love which she uses in this magical stanza:

"I would live in your love as the sea-grasses live in the sea,

Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that recedes."

In the poem, "Peace," the symbol of the woman who loves is the pool: