Your task is to extract from human life, even in its commonest aspects, its most vulgar realities, what it contains of secret beauty; to lift it the level of art, not to degrade art to its level. Few American writers more fully realized these great artistic truths than the master under whose fatherly tuition Miss Conway had long been placed. Boyle O’Reilly was a Grecian in his love for nature. As such it was his aim to seek the beautiful in its commonest aspects, its most vulgar realities. No amount of claptrap or fine writing could make him mistake a daub for a Turner. In the bottom of his soul he detested the little bardlings who had passed nature by, without knowing her, who wove into the warp and woof of their dulness the putridity of Zola and morbidity of Marie Bashkirtseff. Under such a guide, the poetic ideal set before Miss Conway has been of the highest, and the highest is only worth working for. This ideal must be held unswervingly, even if one sees that books that are originally vicious are “placarded in the booksellers’ windows; sold on the street corners; hawked through the railroad trains; yea, given away, with packages of tea or toilet soap, in place of the chromo, mercifully put on the superannuated list.” These books are but foam upon the current of time, flecking its surface for a moment, and passing away into oblivion, while what Miss Conway happily calls the literature of moral loveliness, or what might as aptly be called the literature of all time, remains our contribution to posterity. Its foundations, to follow the thought of Azarias, are deeply laid in human nature, and its structure withstands the storms of adversity and the eddies of events. For such a literature O’Reilly made a life struggle; his pupil has closely followed his footsteps in the charming, simple, melodious volume that lies before me, “A Dream of Lilies.” Rarely has a Catholic book had a more artistic setting, and one might add, rarely has a volume of Catholic verse deserved it more. Here the poetess touches her highest point, and proves that years of silence have been years of study and conscientious workmanship. In her poem “Success” may be found the key to this volume; “Ah! know what true success is; young hearts dream, Dream nobly and plan loftily, nor deem That length of years is length of living. See A whole life’s labor in an hour is done; Not by world-tests the heavenly crown is won, To God the man is what he means to be.”