Prior to this time she had written little verse, her chief work being an analysis of English metrics, an investigation (which she never finished) of certain problems in verse structure. In 1913, after her breakdown, she began to write those brief lines which, like some of Emily Dickinson’s, are so precise and poignant. She was particularly happy in her “Cinquains,” a form that she originated. These five-line stanzas in the strictest possible structure (the lines having, respectively, two, four, six, eight and two syllables) doubtless owe something to the Japanese _hokku_, but Adelaide Crapsey saturated them with her own fragile loveliness. “Her death,” writes her friend, Claude Bragdon, “was tragic. Full of the desire of life she was forced to go, leaving her work all unfinished.” She died at Saranac Lake, New York, on October 8, 1914. Her small volume _Verse_ appeared in 1915, and a part of the unfinished _Study in English Metrics_ was posthumously published in 1918. THREE CINQUAINS NOVEMBER NIGHT Listen ... With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees And fall. TRIAD These be Three silent things: The falling snow ... the hour Before the dawn ... the mouth of one Just dead. THE WARNING Just now, Out of the strange Still dusk ... as strange, as still ... A white moth flew. Why am I grown So cold? ON SEEING WEATHER-BEATEN TREES Is it as plainly in our living shown, By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown? _Grace Hazard Conkling_ Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. After graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music at the University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). Since 1914 she has been a teacher of English at Smith College, where she has done much to create an alert interest in poetry. Mrs. Conkling’s _Afternoons of April_ (1915) and _Wilderness Songs_ (1920) are full of a graciousness that rarely grows cloying. Gentle colors and a gentler sadness are here; soft music, the whisper of flutes above a plaintive English horn, rises from her pages. But the poems are by no means monotonous. A fragrant whimsicality, a childlike freshness vivifies poems like “The Whole Duty of Berkshire Brooks,” “Dilemma” and “Frost on a Window,” which reminds one of the manner of her amazing daughter, Hilda, (see page 394). THE WHOLE DUTY OF BERKSHIRE BROOKS