after graduation she began work as a teacher of History and Literature, in Kemper Hall, Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she had attended preparatory school. In 1905 she went abroad, studying archæology in Rome. After her return she essayed to teach again but her failing health compelled her to discontinue and though she became instructor in Poetics at Smith College in 1911, the burden was too great for her.

Prior to this time she had written little verse, her chief work being an analysis of English metrics, an investigation (which she never finished) of certain problems in verse structure. In 1913, after her breakdown, she began to write those brief lines which, like some of Emily Dickinson's, are so precise and poignant. She was particularly happy in her "Cinquains," a form that she originated. These five-line stanzas in the strictest possible structure (the lines having, respectively, two, four, six, eight and two syllables) doubtless owe something to the Japanese hokku, but Adelaide Crapsey saturated them with her own fragile loveliness.

"Her death," writes her friend, Claude Bragdon, was tragic. Full of the desire of life she was forced to go, leaving her work all unfinished." She died at Saranac Lake, New York, on October 8, 1914. Her small volume Verse appeared in 1915, and a part of the unfinished Study in English Metrics was posthumously published in 1918.

With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees

And fall.

Is it as plainly in our living shown,

By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown?

Grace Hazard Conkling

Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. After graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music at the University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). Since 1914 she has been a teacher of English at Smith College, where she has done much to create an alert interest in poetry.

Mrs. Conkling's Afternoons of April (1915) and Wilderness Songs (1920) are full of a graciousness that rarely grows cloying. Gentle colors and a gentler sadness are here; soft music, the whisper of flutes above a plaintive English horn, rises from her pages. But the poems are by no means monotonous. A

fragrant whimsicality, a child-like freshness vivifies poems like "The Whole Duty of Berkshire Brooks," "Dilemma" and "Frost on a Window," which reminds one of the manner of her amazing daughter, Hilda, (see page 394).

THE WHOLE DUTY OF BERKSHIRE BROOKS
To build the trout a crystal stair;

To comb the hillside's thick green hair;
To water jewel-weed and rushes;
To teach first notes to baby thrushes;
To flavor raspberry and apple
And make a whirling pool to dapple
With scattered gold of late October;
To urge wise laughter on the sober
And lend a dream to those who laugh;
To chant the beetle's epitaph;
To mirror the blue dragonfly,
Frail air-plane of a slender sky;
Over the stones to lull and leap
Herding the bubbles like white sheep;
The claims of worry to deny,
And whisper sorrow into sleep!

FROST ON A WINDOW

This forest looks the way
Nightingales sound.

Tall larches lilt and sway
Above the glittering ground:
The wild white cherry spray
Scatters radiance round.

The chuckle of the nightingale
Is like this elfin wood.

Even as his gleaming trills assail

The spirit's solitude,

These leaves of light, these branches frail

Are music's very mood.

The song of these fantastic trees,
The plumes of frost they wear,
Are for the poet's whim who sees
Through a deceptive air,

And has an ear for melodies
When never a sound is there.

Amelia Josephine Burr

Amelia Josephine Burr was born in New York City in 1878. She was educated at Hunter College and has made her home in Englewood, New Jersey.

A great range of interests has been the outstanding feature of her work. Too often she yields to her own facility, but there is decided vigor in many pages of The Roadside Fire (1912), In Deep Places (1914) and Life and Living (1916).

BATTLE-SONG OF FAILURE

We strain toward Heaven and lay hold on Hell;
With starward eyes we stumble in hard ways,
And to the moments when we see life well
Succeeds the blindness of bewildered days,-

But what of that? Into the sullen flesh

Our souls drive home the spur with splendid sting. Bleeding and soiled, we gird ourselves afresh. Forth, and make firm a highway for the King.

The loveless greed the centuries have stored
In marshy foulness traps our faltering feet.
The sins of men whom punishment ignored

Like fever in our weakened pulses beat;
But what of that? The shame is not to fail
Nor is the victor's laurel everything.

To fight until we fall is to prevail.

Forth, and make firm a highway for the King.

Yea, cast our lives into the ancient slough,
And fall we shouting, with uplifted face;
Over the spot where mired we struggle now
Shall march in triumph a transfigured race.
They shall exult where weary we have wept-
They shall achieve where we have striven in vain--

Leaping in vigor where we faintly crept,

Joyous along the road we paved with pain. What though we seem to sink in the morass? Under those unborn feet our dust shall sing, When o'er our failure perfect they shall pass. Forth, and make firm a highway for the King!