characters than Lincoln, and I do share his heroworship of John P. Altgeld, once governor of Illinois, who died in 1902. Here is Lindsay's tribute to him, one of the best poems of personal tribute in the volume:

Sleep softly. . . eagle forgotten . . . under the stone. Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its

own.

"We have buried him now," thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.

They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.

They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you day

after day.

Now you were ended. They praised you and laid

you away.

The others that mourned you in silence and terror and

truth,

The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth, The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame

and the poor

That should have remembered forever,

more.

remember no

Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call?

The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?
They call on the name of a hundred high-valiant ones,
A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons,
The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began
The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.

Adelaide Crapsey: Poet and Critic

It may be substantially true, as Emerson said, that:

One accent of the Holy Ghost

This heedless world hath never lost,

but the world has grown appreciably more heedless since Emerson wrote, with relatively fewer people in it who have time to do the necessary sifting for the authentic accents. For a few years I was almost afraid that the heedless world was going to lose the precious little collection of poetry which was published after the death of Adelaide Crapsey, especially as in one large city bookstore I saw copies of the first edition of her little book, "Verse," put on a ten cent table. But now that the volume has been reissued it is to be hoped that its intrinsic worth will overcome the world's heedlessness, and that Adelaide Crapsey will take her place as one of the outstanding woman poets of the day-a place beside Emily Dickinson and Alice Meynell, surpassing the one in self-conscious technique, and linked to the other by the fact that she was critic as well as poet, but in the company of both not only because she wrote beautiful poetry but because it is the poetry not of mere imagery but of the adventure

of the spirit: the more important part of Miss Crapsey's verse dealing with the greatest adventure of all: the meeting, foreknown and awaited, with inevitable death.

That Adelaide Crapsey should have been a spiritually courageous person is not surprising to those people who know her father, Dr. Algernon Crapsey, one of the illustrious heretics of his day, a man with burning convictions and a sufferer through his expression of them. His daughter Adelaide was born in 1878, and died of tuberculosis in 1914. After her graduation from Vassar she studied at the School of Archæology in Rome, and then took up teaching as a means of livelihood, and as a life work entered upon an elaborate study of English metrics-of which I shall have more to say later.

She wrote much poetry in her earlier years, but the most part being occasional, she destroyed it, and the verse she left behind her was gathered together during the last year of her life-spent at Saranac Lake in a vain struggle against tuberculosis. Much of it indeed was written during that period-the poetry of death written by one who did not, like the average poet, think of death but who saw it coming and who deliberately shaped her sheaf of poems as a memorial:

Wouldst thou find my ashes? Look

In the pages of my book;

And, as these thy hand doth turn,
Know here is my funeral urn.

Miss Crapsey was a pagan in the classical rather than in the popular sense of the word, and she would have her funeral urn a thing of beauty. And so around it we find a wreath of blossoms of poetry, a small flower of a new shape: Cinquains, she called them, and they may be described as little poems that do, under the law of English prosody, what the hokkus and similar forms do for Japan. Of course our "free verse" writers try to write actual hokkus and tankas in English, but the results are disappointing, as there is no magic for us in a mere arbitrary number of syllables. Miss Crapsey did not merely count syllables, but devised her five line poems in an iambic series, adapted to decoration, as in "Blue Hyacinth"

In your

Curled petals what ghosts

Of blue headlands and seas,

What perfumed immortal breath sighing
Of Greece;

-but decoration with a far-reaching suggestivenessand equally adapted to moods, as in "Night Winds":

The old

Old winds that blew

When chaos was, what do

They tell the clattered trees that I

Should weep?

or, like some of the smallest of William Blake's engravings, envisaging the largest spaces:

But even in these cinquains the poet writes of her own death:

Not only the beauty of these cinquains but the novelty of their form, fitting in as it did with the fashion for experimentation, gained for them a relative popularity, and when Miss Crapsey is quoted in anthologies the cinquains are usually chosen. But that, perhaps, is not fair to her other work, which ranges from an almost tempestuous joy in life, as seen in the two first poems of her book, written in 1905 and celebrating—

Desire on first fulfillment's radiant edge,

to a grappling with death which is prophetic in her poem of 1909 on John Keats: