A large amount of the poetry of the era has been written by women. After the war their thin volumes, bound in creamy vellum and daintily tinted cloth, began more and more to fill the book tables, until reviewers no longer could give separate notice to them, but must consider the poets of a month in groups of ten or twelve. The quality of the feminine product was high enough to find place in the most exclusive monthlies, and the quantity published was surprising. The _Atlantic Monthly_, for instance, during the decade from 1870 published 108 poems by Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Aldrich, and 450 other poems, and of the latter 201 were by women. The feminine novelists and short story writers, so conspicuous during all the period, were, indeed, almost all poets, some of them voluminous. One may note the names not only of the older group--Mrs. Stuart Phelps Ward, Mrs. Cooke, Mrs. Spofford, Miss Woolson--but of such later writers as Mrs. Freeman, Alice Brown, Mrs. Deland, and Mrs. Riggs. Very little of this mass of poetry has been strong enough to demand republication from the dainty volumes in which it first appeared. It has been smooth and often melodious, but for the most part it has been conventional. Prevailingly it has been short lyric song in minor key, gentle and sentimental--graceful exercises in verse rather than voices from a soul stirred to utterance and caring not. In a sonneteering age this feminine contingent has swelled enormously the volume of sonnets. Helen Hunt Jackson's thin volume contains one hundred, Louise Chandler Moulton's one hundred and thirty-one, yet in both collections occurs no sonnet one would dream of adding to the select few that undoubtedly are worth while. Here and there in Mrs. Jackson a bit of work like "Poppies on the Wheat," "Glimpses," "Vashti," that rises, perhaps, a little above the level monotony of the times, but in the vital seventies in America why should one have published sonnets? Even as she was shaping them, Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was demanding in major key, How long, and yet how long, Our leaders will we hail from over seas, Masters and kings from feudal monarchies, And mock their ancient song With echoes weak of foreign melodies? * * * * * This fresh young world I see, With heroes, cities, legends of her own; With a new race of men, and overblown By winds from sea to sea, Decked with the majesty of every zone. * * * * * The distant siren-song Of the green island in the eastern sea, Is not the lay for this new chivalry. It is not free and strong To chant on prairies 'neath this brilliant sky.