* * * * * Writing undoubtedly at the same time as Amy Lowell, for she was born in the same year, was Rose O’Neill. This woman is likely to be recalled today as the creator of the Kewpies, those coy cherubs which became a national fad early in the century, rather than as a serious artist and writer. Nevertheless, she was poet, novelist, and illustrator, the income from her juvenile and humorous works enabling her to pursue her deeper interests. Her claim to inclusion here rests on her single volume of serious verse, which was not published until 1922. Of it, Clement Wood says in his _Poets of America_: Her poetry will lose a certain Puritan following because of her cryptic frankness on the theme of love. She does not write this across the sky; neither does she, as is the convention, make this creep into a hole and draw the hole in after it. It is here, in a few poems; those who are not offended by this note in the masters since the Greeks, will not be offended by it here.[48] Its title, taken from Shakespeare’s most debated sonnet, is _The Master Mistress_, and the title poem hymns “a lovely monster ... seeming two in one, With dreadful beauty doomed,” but the subsequent references to variance are comparatively few and almost equally vague. Only a dozen poems among some two hundred are unmistakably variant—ten written “To Kallista” (that notation appearing as subtitle); “Lee: A Portrait,” and “A Dream of Sappho.” None but the last alludes vividly to any physical expression of love, but all are passionate, and many are specific in their praise of feminine beauty. The third poem in the volume reads: The sonnet begs me like a bridegroom, “Come within.” “This palace! Not for me, the desert-born!” I turn me, as from some too lordly sin, And like a singing Hagar, pause and pass— To lift for night’s sweet thieves my restless horn In broken rhythms of the windy grass. I will not be the measure-pacing bride, But where the flutes come faintly, Sing outside. Like drifting sand my love doth drift and change— I strangely sing because my love is strange. From the lot of these variant poems the reader retains half-realized images of two different loves, one a delicate and feminine personality, “ceaselessly weeping,” the other: Mimic, dancer, cavalier, Silky hand the proud horse loves to fear; Sailor and adventurer ... She who lingers, loves, and goes alone.[49] Though verses spoken through the lips of a fictitious man are much less frequent than in Amy Lowell’s work, two such poems occur. And there are many to which a Celtic titanism—fancies of removing mountains or seizing the moon and stars for toys—lends a definitely masculine tone. Such phrases as “in your princely fashion” and “fitting for you who feast upon fierce things” indicate, moreover, that the poet glories in the masculinity of one of her woman-loves.