In _Can Grande’s Castle_ (1918), Miss Lowell achieves a broader line; the teller of stories, the bizarre decorator and the experimentalist are finally fused. The poems in this volume are only four in number—four polyphonic prose poems of almost epic length, but they are extraordinarily varied in music, sweeping in their sense of magnitude and time. _Pictures of the Floating World_ (1919) which followed is, in many ways, Miss Lowell’s most personal revelation. Although there are several pages devoted to the merely dazzling and grotesque, most of these poems are in a quieter key; a new restraint gives unsuspected overtones to stanzas that have much in common with the earlier “Patterns” where the narrative, the character and the thing observed are inextricably knit. Besides Miss Lowell’s original poetry, she has made many studies in Japanese and Chinese poetry reflecting, even in her own work, their Oriental colors and contours. She has also written two volumes of critical essays: _Six French Poets_ (1915) and _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_ (1917), both of them invaluable aids to the student of contemporary literature. SOLITAIRE[30] When night drifts along the streets of the city, And sifts down between the uneven roofs, My mind begins to peek and peer. It plays at ball in odd, blue Chinese gardens, And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples Amid the broken flutings of white pillars. It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair, And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses. How light and laughing my mind is, When all good folk have put out their bedroom candles, And the city is still. MEETING-HOUSE HILL I must be mad, or very tired, When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune, And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon. Clear, reticent, superbly final, With the pillars of its portico refined to a cautious elegance, It dominates the weak trees, And the shot of its spire Is cool and candid, Rising into an unresisting sky. Strange meeting-house Pausing a moment upon a squalid hill-top. I watch the spire sweeping the sky, I am dizzy with the movement of the sky; I might be watching a mast With its royals set full Straining before a two-reef breeze. I might be sighting a tea-clipper, Tacking into the blue bay, Just back from Canton With her hold full of green and blue porcelain And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail Gazing at the white spire With dull, sea-spent eyes. A LADY[31]