Sometimes when all the world seems grey and dun And nothing beautiful, a voice will cry, “Look out, look out! Angels are drawing nigh!” Then my slow burdens leave me one by one, And swiftly does my heart arise and run Even like a child while loveliness goes by— And common folk seem children of the sky, And common things seem shapèd of the sun. Oh, pitiful! that I who love them, must So soon perceive their shining garments fade! And slowly, slowly, from my eyes of trust Their flaming banners sink into a shade! While this earth’s sunshine seems the golden dust Slow settling from that radiant cavalcade. _Amy Lowell_ Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, February 9, 1874, of a long line of noted publicists and poets, the first colonist (a Percival Lowell) arriving in Newburyport in 1637. James Russell Lowell was a cousin of her grandfather; Abbott Lawrence, her mother’s father, was minister to England; and Abbott Lawrence Lowell, her brother, is president of Harvard University. Miss Lowell obtained her early education through private tuition and travel abroad. These European journeys were the background upon which much of Miss Lowell’s later work is unconsciously woven; her visits to France, Egypt, Turkey and Greece bore fruit, many years later, in the exotic colors of her verse. As a young girl, she had vague aspirations toward being a writer; but it was not until 1902, when she was twenty-eight years old, that she definitely determined to be a poet. For eight years she served a rigorous and solitary apprenticeship, reading the classics of all schools and countries, studying the technique of verse, exercising her verbal power—but never attempting to publish a single line. In 1910 her first verse was printed in _The Atlantic Monthly_; two years later her first book appeared.