There the flower springs, Therein does grow The bud of hope, the miracle to come For whose dear advent we are striving dumb And joyless: Garden of Delight That God has sowed! In thee the flower of flowers, The apple of our tree, The banner of our towers, The recompense for every misery, The angel-man, the purity, the light Whom we are working to has his abode; Until our back and forth, our life and death And life again, our going and return Prepare the way: until our latest breath, Deep-drawn and agonized, for him shall burn A path: for him prepare Laughter and love and singing everywhere; A morning and a sunrise and a day! _Margaret L. Woods_ About one half of the poetry in Mrs Woods' collected edition is dramatic in character. There are two plays in regular form, tragedies both. One, _Wild Justice,_ is in six scenes which carry the action rapidly forward almost without a break. The other, called _The Princess of Hanover_, is in three acts, which move with a wider sweep through the rise, culmination, and crisis of a tragic story. These two dramas, which are powerfully imagined and skilfully wrought, are placed in a separate section at the end of the book--quite the best wine thus being left to finish the feast. Fine as they are, however, the plays do not completely represent the poet's dramatic gift. And when we note the comic elements of two or three pieces which are tucked away in the middle of the volume, we may admit a hope that Mrs Wood may be impelled on some fair day to attempt regular comedy. There is, for instance, the fun of the delightful medley called "Marlborough Fair." Here are broad humour and vigorous, hearty life which smells of the soil; little studies of country-folk, incomplete but vivid; scraps of racy dialogue, and the prattle of a child, all interwoven with the grotesquer fancies of a fertile imagination, endowing even the beasts and inanimate objects of the show with consciousness and speech. Hints there are in plenty (though to be sure they are in some cases no more than hints) that the poet's dramatic sense would handle the common stuff of life as surely and as freely as it deals with tragedy. In this particular poem, of course, the touches are of the nature of low comedy; the awkward sweethearting of a pair of rustic lovers; the showman, alternating between bluster and enticement; the rough banter of a group of farm lads about the cokernut-shy, and the matron who presides there-- Swarthy and handsome and broad of face 'Twixt the banded brown of her glossy hair. In her ears are shining silver rings, Her head and massive throat are bare, She needs good length in her apron strings And has a jolly voice and loud To cry her wares and draw the crowd.