Adventures in the Arts Part 9

Divine Tuesday! I had wondered if those remarkable evenings of conversation in the rue de Rome with Mallarme as host, and Henri de Regnier as guest, among many others, had been the inspiration of the evenings at the Closerie de Lilas, where I so often sat of an evening, watching the numbers of esthetes gather, filling the entire cafe, rain or s.h.i.+ne, waiting unquestionably, for it pervaded the air always, the feeling of suspense, of a dinner without host, of a wedding without bridegroom, in any event waiting for the real genius of the evening, le grand maitre prince de poetes, Paul Fort. The interesting book of Amy Lowell's, "Six French Poets," recalls these Tuesday evenings vividly to my mind, and a number of episodes in connection with the idea of poetry in Paris.

Poetry an event? A rather remarkable notion it would seem, and yet this was always so, it was a const.i.tuent of the day's pa.s.sing, there was never a part of the day in this arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, when you would not find here, there, everywhere, from the Boul-Mich up, down Montparna.s.se to Lavenue's, and back to the Closerie, groups of a few or of many, obviously the artist or poet type, sometimes very nattily dressed, often the reverse, but you found them talking upon one theme, art, meaning either poetry or painting, cubistes, futuristes, orphistes and doubtless every "iste" in poetry from the symboliste period up to the "unanimistes" of the present time, or the then present time nearly two years before the war. It was a bit novel, even for a sensitive American, sitting there, realizing that it was all in the name of art, and for the heralding of genius--a kind of sublimated recruiting meeting for the enlistment in the army of expression of personality, or for the saving of the soul of poetry.

It was a spectacle, edifying in its purport, or even a little distressing if one had no belief in a sense of humour, for there were moments of absurdity about it as there is sure to be in a room filled with any type of concerted egotism. But you did not forget the raison d'etre of it all, you did not forget that when the "prince" arrived there was the spirit of true celebration about it, the celebration not only of an arrived artist, but of an idea close to the hearts and minds of those present, and you had a sense, too, of what it must have been like in that circle of, no doubt, a higher average of adherents, in the drawing room of the genius Mallarme, who, from all accounts, was as perfected in the art of conversation, as he was in expression in art. When I read Miss Lowell's chapter on Henri de Regnier, I find myself before the door of the Mallarme house in the rue de Rome, probably the only American guest, on that Sunday morning in June, just one given a privilege that could not mean as much as if I had been more conversant with the delicacies of the language.

It was the occasion of the placing of a tablet of homage to the great poet, at which ceremony Henri de Regnier himself was the chief speaker: a tall, very aristocratic, very elegant looking Frenchman, not any more to be called young, nor yet to be called old, but conspicuously simple, dignified, dressed in a manner of a gentleman of the first order, standing upon a chair, speaking, as one would imagine, with a flow of words which were the epitome of music itself to the ear. I had been invited by a poet well known in Paris, with several volumes to his credit and by a young literary woman, both of whom spoke English very creditably. After the ceremonies, which were very brief, and at which Madame Mallarme herself was present, standing near the speaker, de Regnier, the entire company repaired to a restaurant near the Place Clichy, if I remember rightly. My hostess named for me the various guests as they appeared, Madame Rachilde, Reynaldo Hahn, Andre Gide, and a dozen other names less conspicuous, perhaps, excepting one, Leon Dierx, who was an old man, and whose death was announced about the city some days later. It was, needless to say, a conspicuous company and the dinner went off very quietly, allowing of course for the always feverish sound of the conversation of many people talking in a not very large room.

But all these suggestions recall for me once more what such things mean to a people like the French, or, let one say, Europeans as well.

I wonder what poetry or even painting will do, if they shall rise to such a state in this country that we shall find our masters of literature holding audience with this degree of interest like Fort, or as did all the great masters of literature in Paris, hold forth in the name of art, a divine Tuesday set apart for the admirable wors.h.i.+p of poetry, or of things esthetic. I can imagine Amy Lowell doing something of this sort after the custom of those masters she so admires, with her seemingly quenchless enthusiasms for all that is modern in poetry. I think we shall wait long for that, for the time when we shall have our best esthetics over the coffee, at the curbside under the trees with the sun s.h.i.+ning upon it, or the shadow of the evening lending its sanction, under the magnetic influence of such a one as Paul Fort or Francis Jammes, or Emile Verhaeren--as it was once to be had among such as Verlaine, Baudelaire and that high company of distinguished painters who are now famous among us.

The studio of Gertude Stein, that quiet yet always lively place in the rue de Fleurus, is the only room I have ever been in where this spirit was organized to a similar degree, for here you had the sense of the real importance of painting, as it used to be thought of in the days of p.i.s.sarro, Manet, Degas, and the others, and you had much, in all human ways, out of an evening there, and, most of all, you had a fund of good humour thrust at you, and the conversation took on, not the quality of poetic prose spoken, as you had the quality of yourself and others, a kind of William James intimacy, which, as everyone knows, is style bringing the universe of ideas to your door in terms of your own sensations. There may have been a touch of all this at the once famed Brook Farm, but I fancy it was rather chill in its severity.

There is something of charm in the French idea of taking their discussions to the sunlight or the shadow under the stars, either within or outside the cafe, where you feel the pa.s.sing of the world, and the poetry is of one piece with life itself, not the result of stuffy studios, and excessively ornate library corners, where books crowd out the quality of people and things. You felt that the cafe was the place for it, and if the acrobat came and sang, it was all of one fabric and it was as good for the poetry, as it was for the eye and the ear that absorbed it. Despite the different phases of the spectacle of Tuesday, at the Closerie de Lilas, you had the feeling of its splendour, its excellence, and, most of all, of its reality, its relations.h.i.+p to every other phase of life, and not of the hypersensitivity of the thing as we still consider it among ourselves in general; and if you heard the name of Paul Fort, or Francis Jammes, it was a definite issue in daily life, equal with the name of the great statesmen in importance, you were being introduced into a sphere of activities of the utmost importance, _that_ poetry was something to be reckoned with.

It was not merely to hear oneself talk that artists like Mallarme held forth with distinction, that artists like de Regnier and Fort devote themselves, however secretly, or however openly to the sacred theme.

They had but one intention, and that to arrive at, and a.s.sist in the realization of the best state of poetry, that shall have carried the art further on its way logically, and in accordance with the principles which they have created for their time; endeavoring always to create fresh values, new points of contact with the prevailing as well as with the older outlines of the cla.s.sics. It was, then, a spectacle, from our removed point of view, the gathering of the poetic mult.i.tude around the cafe tables, over the Dubonnet, the grenadines, and the cafe noir, of a Tuesday evening. It gave one a sense of perpetuity, of the indestructibility of art, in spite of the obstacles encountered in the run of the day, that the artist has the advantage over the layman in being qualified to set down, in shapes imperishable, those states of his imagination which are the shapes of life and of nature.

We may be grateful to Amy Lowell for having a.s.sembled for our consummation, in a world where poetry is not as yet the sublime issue as it was to be felt at every street corner, much of the spirit of the rue de Rome, the Cafe Novelles D'Athenes, and the Closerie de Lilas, as well as the once famed corner of the Cafe D'Harcourt where the absinthe flowed so continuously, and from which some very exquisite poetry has emanated for all time. It is the first intimation we have of what our best English poetry has done for the best French poets of the present, and what our first free verse poet has done for the general liberation of emotions and for freedom of form in all countries. He has indicated the poets that are to follow him. He would be the first to sanction all this poetic discussive intensity at the curbside, the liberty and freedom of the cafe, the excellence of a divine Tuesday evening.

EMILY d.i.c.kINSON

If I want to take up poetry in its most delightful and playful mood, I take up the verses of that remarkable girl of the sixties and seventies, Emily d.i.c.kinson, she who was writing her little worthless poetic nothings, or so she was wont to think of them, at a time when the now cla.s.sical New England group was flouris.h.i.+ng around Concord, when Hawthorne was burrowing into the soul of things, Th.o.r.eau was refusing to make more pencils and took to sounding lake bottoms and holding converse with all kinds of fish and other water life, and Emerson was standing high upon his pedestal preaching of compensations, of friends.h.i.+p, society and the oversoul, leaving a mighty impress upon his New England and the world at large as well.

I find when I take up Emily d.i.c.kinson, that I am sort of sunning myself in the discal radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type of poet, for she is by no means worn of her freshness for us, she wears with one as would an old fas.h.i.+oned pearl set in gold and dark enamels. She offsets the smugness of the time in which she lived with her cheery impertinence, and startles the present with her uncommon gifts. Those who know the irresistible charm of this girl--who gave so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired for a photograph: "I had no portrait now, but am small like the wren, and my hair is bold like the chestnut burr, and my eyes like the sherry in the gla.s.s that the guest leaves," this written in July, 1862--shall be of course familiar with the undeniable originality of her personality, the grace and special beauty of her mind, charm unique in itself, not like any other genius then or now, or in the time before her, having perhaps a little of relations.h.i.+p to the crystal clearness of Crashaw, like Vaughan and Donne maybe, in respect of their lyrical fervour and moral earnestness, yet nevertheless appearing to us freshly with as separate a spirit in her verse creations as she herself was separated from the world around her by the amplitude of garden which was her universe. Emily d.i.c.kinson confronts you at once with an instinct for poetry, to be envied by the more ordinary and perhaps more finished poets. Ordinary she never was, common she never could have been, for she was first and last aristocrat in sensibility, rare and untouchable if you will, vague and mystical often enough, unapproachable and often distinctly aloof, as undoubtedly she herself was in her personal life. Those with a fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, forbidding and difficult, if not altogether terrifying the mind with her vagueries and peculiarities.

Here was New England at its sharpest, brightest, wittiest, most fantastic, most wilful, most devout, saint and imp sported in one, toying with the tricks of the Deity, taking them now with extreme profundity, then tossing them about like irresistible toys with an incomparable triviality. She has traced upon the page and with celestial indelibility that fine line from her soul which is like a fine prismatic light, separating one bright sphere from another, one planet from another planet, and the edge of separation is but faintly perceptible. She has left us this bright folio of her "lightning and fragrance in one," scintillant with stardust as perhaps no other before her, certainly not in this country, none with just her celestial attachedness, or must we call it detachedness, and withal also a sublime, impertinent playfulness which makes her images dance before one like offspring of the great round sun, fooling zealously with the universes at her feet, and just beyond her eye, with a loftiness of spirit and of exquisite trivialness seconded by none. Who has not read these flippant renderings, holding always some touch of austerity and gravity of mood, or the still more perfect "letters" to her friends, will, I think, have missed a new kind of poetic diversion, a new loveliness, evasive, alert, p.r.o.nounced in every interval and serious, modestly so, and at a bound leaping as it were like some sky child pranking with the clouds, and the hills and the valleys beneath them, child as she surely was always, playing in some celestial garden s.p.a.ce in her mind, where every species of tether was unendurable, where freedom for this childish sport was the one thing necessary to her ever young and incessantly capering mind--"hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou ever wert"!

It must be said in all justice, then, that "fascination was her element," everything to her was wondrous, sublimely magical, awsomely inspiring and thrilling. It was the event of many moons to have someone she liked say so much as good morning to her in human tongue, it was the event of every instant to have the flowers and birds call her by name, and hear the clouds exult at her approach. She was the brightest young sister of fancy, as she was the gifted young daughter of the ancient imagination. One feels everywhere in her verse and in her so splendid and stylish letters an unexcelled freshness, brightness of metaphor and of imagery, a gift of a peculiarity that could have come only from this part of our country, this part of the world, this very spot which has bred so many intellectual and spiritual ent.i.ties wrapped in the garments of isolation, robed with questioning. Her genius is in this sense essentially local, as much the voice of the spirit of New England as it is possible for one to hold. If ever wanderer hitched vehicle to the comet's tail, it was the poetic, sprite woman, no one ever rode the sky and the earth as she did in this radiant and skybright mind of her.

She loved all things because all things were in one way or in another way bright for her, and of a blinding brightness from which she often had to hide her face. She embroidered all her thoughts with starry intricacies, and gave them the splendour of frosty traceries upon the windowpane in a frigid time, and of the raindrop in the sun, and summered them with fragrancing of the many early and late flowers of her own fanciful conjuring. They are glittering garlands of her clear, cool fancies, these poems, fraught in some instances, as are certain finely cut stones, with an exceptional mingling of lights coursing swiftly through them. She was avid of starlight and of sunlight alike, and of that light by which all things are illumined with a splendour not their own merely, but lent them by shafts from that radiant sphere which she leaned from, looking out gleefully upon them from the window of that high place in her mind.

To think of this poet is to think of crystal, for she lived in a radianced world of innumerable facets, and the common instances were chariots upon which to ride widely over the edges of infinity. She is alive for us now in those rare fancies of hers, with no other wish in them save as memorandum for her own eyes, and when they were finished to send them spinning across the wide garden, many of them to her favorite sister who lived far, far away, over beyond the hedge. You shall find in her all that is winsome, strange, fanciful, fantastic and irresistible in the eastern character and characteristic. She is first and best in lightsomeness of temper, for the eastern is known as essentially a tragic genius. She is perhaps the single exponent of modern times of the quality of true celestial frivolity. Scintillant was she then, and like dew she was and the soft summer rain, and the light upon the lips of flowers of which she loved to sing. Her mind and her spirit were one, soul and sense inseparable, little sister of Sh.e.l.ley certainly she was, and the more playful relative of Francis Thompson.

She had about her the imperishable quality that hovers about all things young and strong and beautiful, she was the sense of beauty ungovernable. What there are of tendencies religious and moral disturb in nowise those who love and have appreciation for true poetic essences. She had in her brain the inevitable buzzing of the bee in the belly of the bloom, she had in her eyes the climbing lances of the sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless.

If she loved people, she loved them for what they were, if she despised them she despised them for what they did, or for lack of power to feel they could not do. Silence under a tree was a far more talkative experience with her than converse with one or a thousand dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings were the mult.i.tude of flying movements in her brain. She had only to think and she was amid numberless minarets and golden domes, she had only to think and the mountain cleft its shadow in her heart.

Emily d.i.c.kinson is in no sense toil for the mind accustomed to the labours of reading, she is too fanciful and delicious ever to make heavy the head, she sets you to laughter and draws a smile across your face for pity, and lets you loose again amid the measureless pleasing little humanities. I shall always want to read Emily d.i.c.kinson, for she points her finger at all tiresome scholasticism, and takes a chance with the universe about her and the first rate poetry it offers at every hand within the eye's easy glancing. She has made poetry memorable as a pastime for the mind, and sent the heavier ministerial tendencies flying to a speedy oblivion. What a child she was, child impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her brain!

These random pa.s.sages out of her writings will show at once the rarity of her tastes and the originality of her phrasing. "February pa.s.sed like a kate, and I know March. Here is the light the stranger said was not on sea or land--myself could arrest it, but will not chagrin him"--

"The wind blows gay today, and the jays bark like blue terriers."

"Friday I tasted life, it was a vast morsel. A circus pa.s.sed the house--still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out."

"The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the tree."

"The zeros taught us phosphorus We learned to like the fire By playing glaciers when a boy And tinder guessed by power

"Of opposite to balance odd If white a red must be!

Paralysis, our primer dumb Unto vitality."

Then comes the "crowning extravaganza.... If I read a book, and it makes my whole body so cold no fire will ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there any other way? These are the only ways I know it."

No one but a New England yankee mind could concoct such humours and fascinatingly pert phrases as are found here. They are like the chatterings of the interrupted squirrel in the tree-hole at nut-time.

There is so much of high gossip in these poetic turns of hers, and so, throughout her books, one finds a mult.i.tude of playful tricks for the pleased mind to run with. She was an intoxicated being, drunken with the little tipsy joys of the simplest form, shaped as they were to elude always her evasive imagination into thinking that nothing she could think or feel but was extraordinary and remarkable. "Your letter gave no drunkenness because I tasted rum before--Domingo comes but once," etc., she wrote to Col. Higginson, a pretty conceit, surely to offer a loved friend. The pa.s.sages offered will give the unfamiliar reader a taste of the sparkle of this poet's hurrying fancy and set her before the willing mind entrancingly, it seems to me. She will always delight those who find it in their way to love her elfish, evasive genius, and those who care for the vivid and living element in words will find her, to say the least, among the masters in her feeling for their strange shapes and the fresh significance contained in them. A born thinker of poetry, and in a great measure a gifted writer of it, refres.h.i.+ng many a heavy moment made dull with the weightiness of books, or of burdensome thinking. This poet-sprite sets scurrying all weariness of the brain, and they shall have an hour of sheer delight who invite poetic converse with Emily d.i.c.kinson. She will repay with funds of rich celestial coin from her rare and precious fancyings. She had that "oblique integrity" which she celebrates in one of her poems.

ADELAIDE c.r.a.pSEY

One more satellite hurried away too soon! High hints at least, of the young meteor finding its way through s.p.a.ce. Here was another of those, with a vast fund of wis.h.i.+ng in her brain, and the briefest of hours in which to set them roaming. Brevities that whirl through the mind as you read those cinquains of Adelaide c.r.a.psey, like white birds through the dark woodlands of the night. Cameos or castles, what is size? Is it not the same if they are of one perfection of feeling? Such a little book of Adelaide c.r.a.psey, surely like cameos cut on sh.e.l.l, so clear in outline, so rich in form, so brave in indications, so much of singing, so much of poetry, of courage.

"Just now, Out of the strange Still dusk--as strange, as still, A white moth flew; Why am I grown So cold?"

Isn't the evidence sufficient here of first rate poetic gifts, sensibility of an exceptional order? Contrast in so many ways with that perhaps more radiant and certainly more whimsical girl, with her rarest of flavours, she with her "whip of diamond, riding to meet the Earl"! I think geniuses like Keats or Sh.e.l.ley would have said "how do you do, poet?" to Adelaide c.r.a.psey and her verse, lamenting also that she flew over the rainbowed edge of the dusk too soon, like the very moth over the garden wall, early in the evening. It is sure that had this poet been allowed her full quota of days, she would have left some handsome folios bright enough for any one caring for verse at its purest. Pity there was not time for another book at least, of her verses, to verify the great distinction conferred. She might have walked still more largely away with the wreaths of recognition. Not time for more books, instead of so much eternity at her bedside. She would surely have sent more words singing to their high places and have impressed the abundant output of the day with its superficiality by her seriousness. There is no trifling in these poetic things of hers. Trivial might some say who hanker after giantesque composition.

Fragile are they only in the sense of size, only in this way are they small.

Those who know the difficulties of writing poetic composition are aware of the task involved in creating such packed brevities. Emily d.i.c.kinson knew this power. "H. D." is another woman who understands the beauty of compactness. Superb sense of economy, of terseness the art calls for, excessive pruning and clipping. Singular that these three artists, so gifted in brevity were women. There is little, after all, in existence that warrants lengthy dissertation. Life itself is epigrammatic and brief enough. No volumes needed by way of explanation. The fascinating enigma diverts and perplexes everyone alike. The simple understand it best, or at least they seem to do so.

Segregation, aloofness, spiritual imprisonment, which is another name for introspection, the looking out from bars of the caged house, all this discovers something through penetration. Walking with life is most natural, grazing its warm shoulder. There is little room for inquiry if one have the real feeling of life itself. Poetry is that which gleans most by keeping nearest to life. Books and firesides avail but little. Secretaries for the baggage of erudition do not enhance poetic values, they enc.u.mber them. Poetry is not declamation, it is not propaganda, it is breathing natural breaths. There is nothing mechanical about poetry excepting the affectation of forms.

Poetry is the world's, it is everybody's. You count poetry by its essence, and no amount of studied effect, or bulging erudition will create that which is necessary, that which makes poetry what it is.

The one essential is power to sing, and the intelligence to get it down with degrees of mastery or naturalness, which is one and the same thing.

Real singing is unusual as real singers are rare. Adelaide c.r.a.psey shows that she was a real singer, essentially poet, excellent among those of our time. She impresses her uncommon qualities upon you, in the cinquains of hers, with genuinely incisive force. She has so much of definiteness, so much of technical beauty, economy, all very valuable a.s.sets for a true poet. She had never been touched with the mania for journalistic profusion. She cared too much for language to ride it. She cared too much for words to want to whip them into slavery. She was outside of them, looking on, as it might be, through crystal, at their freshness. She did not take them for granted. They were new to her and she wanted the proper familiarity. She worked upon a spiritual geometric all her own. She did not run to the dictionary for eccentricities, she did not hunt words out of countenance. They were natural to her. She wanted most their simple beauty, and she succeeded. She had dignity, a rare gift in these times. She raises herself above the many by her fine feeling for the precision. That is her artistry, the word, the thing of beauty and the joy forever with her.

It is to be regretted that Adelaide c.r.a.psey had no more time for the miniature microscopic equations, the little thing seen large, the large thing seen vividly. She might have spent more hours with them and less with her so persistent guest, this second self at her side; ironic presence, when she most would have strode with the brighter companion, her first and natural choice. Her contribution is conspicuous among us for its balance and its intellectualism tempered with fine emotions. She had so much to settle for herself, so much bargaining for the little escapes in which to register herself consistently, so much of consultation for her body's sake, that her mind flew the dark s.p.a.ces about her bed with consistent feverishness.

Reckoning is not the genius of life. It is the painful, residual element of reflection. One must give, one must pay. It is not inspiring to beg for breath, yet this has come to many a fine artist, many a fine soul whose genius was far more of the ability for living, with so little of the ability for dying. You cannot think along with clarity, with the doom of dark recognition nudging your shoulder every instant. There must be somehow apertures of peace for production.

Adelaide c.r.a.psey's chief visitant was doom. She saw the days vanis.h.i.+ng, and the inevitable years lengthening over her. No wonder she could write brevities, she whose existence was brevity itself. The very flicker of the lamp was among the last events. What, then, was the fluttering of the moth but a monstrous intimation. If her work was chilled with severity, it was because she herself was covered with the cool branches of decision. Nature was cold with her, hence there is the ring of ice in these little pieces of hers. They are veiled with the grey of many a sunless morning.

"These be Three silent things; The falling snow,--the hour Before the dawn,--the mouth of one Just dead."

Here you have the intensity once more of Adelaide c.r.a.psey. It haunts you like the something on the dark stairway as you pa.s.s, just as when, on the roadway in the dead of night, the twig grazing one's cheek would seem like the springing panther at one's throat. Dramatic vividness is certainly her chief distinction. No playfulness here, but a stout reckoning with austere beauty. The wish to record the element at its best that played so fierce a role in her life. She writes her own death hymn, lays her own shroud out, s.p.a.ces her own epilogue as if to give the engraver, who sets white words on white stone, the clue, stones the years stare on, leaving the sunlight to streak the old pathos there, and then settles herself to the long way of lying, to the sure sleep that gla.s.sed her keen eyes, shutting them down too soon on a world that held so much poetry for her.

The t.i.tles of her cinquains, such as "November night", "The guarded wound", "The warning", "Fate defied", and the final touch of inevitability in "The Lonely Death", so full of the intensity of last moments, intimate the resolute presence of the grey companion of the covering mists. It must be said hurriedly that Adelaide c.r.a.psey was not all doom. By no means. The longer pieces in her tiny book attest to her feeling for riches, and the lyrical wonders of the hour. Her fervour is the artist's fervour, the longing, coming really to pa.s.sion, to hold and fix forever the shapes that were loveliest to her. That is the poet's existence, that is the poet's labour, and his last distress. No one wants to give in to a commonplace world when the light that falls on it is lovelier than the place it falls on. If you cannot transpose the object, transport it, however simply, however ornately, then of what use is poetry? It is transport!

Adelaide c.r.a.psey was efficient in her knowledge of what poetry is, as she was certainly proficient as workman. She was lapidary more than painter or sculptor. It was a beautiful cutting away, and a sweeping aside of the rifts and flaws. That is to say, she wanted that. She wanted the white light of the perfect gem, and she could not have been content with just matrix, with here and there embedded chips. She was a washer of gold, and spared no labours for the bright nuggets she might get, and the percentage of her panning was high. But the cloud hung on the mountain she clomb, and her way was dimmed.

"In the cold I will rise, I will bathe In the waters of ice; Myself Will s.h.i.+ver, and will shrive myself Alone in the dawn, and anoint Forehead and feet and hands; I will shutter the windows from light, I will place in their sockets the four Tall candles and set them a-flame In the grey of the dawn; And myself Will lay myself straight in my bed, And draw the sheet under my chin."

There could be no more of resolute finality in this chill epilogue.

There is the cold of a thousand years shuddering out of this scene, it is the pa.s.sing, the last of this delicate and gifted poet, Adelaide c.r.a.psey. If she has written more than her book prints, these must surely be of her best. She took the shape of that which she made so visible, so cold, so beautiful. With her white wings she has skirted the edge of the dusk with an incredible calm. No whimpering here. Too much artistry for that; too much of eye to let heart rule. The gifts of Adelaide c.r.a.psey were high ones, and that she left so little of song is regrettable, even though she left us a legacy of some of the best singing of the day. It is enough to call her poet, for she was among the first of this hour and time. She had no affectations, no fas.h.i.+onable theories and ambitions. She simply wrote excellent verse.

That is her beautiful gift to us.