It will be seen that the lyric gift of the poet moves at the prompting of an imaginative passion. It is nearly always so in this poetry. Very seldom does the impulse appear to come from intimate personal emotion or individual experience; and the volume may therefore help to refute the dogma that the poetry of a woman is bound to be subjective, from the laws of her own nature. Occasionally, of course, a direct cry will seem to make itself heard--the most reticent human creature will pay so much toll to its humanity. And it is true that in such a spontaneous utterance the voice will be distinctively feminine--life as the woman knows it will find its interpreter. Thus we see austerity breaking down in the poem "On the Death of an Infant," mournfully sweet with a mother's sorrow. Hence, too, in "Under the Lamp" comes the loathing for "the vile hidden commerce of the city"; and equally there comes a touch of that feminine bias (yielding in these late days perhaps to fuller knowledge and consequent sympathy) which inclines to regard the evil from the point of view of the degradation of the man rather than that of the hideous wrong to the woman. Or again, there is "The Changeling," perhaps the tenderest of the few poems which may perhaps, in some sense, be called subjective. Through the thin veil of allegory one catches a glimpse of the enduring mystery of maternal love. The mother is brooding over the change in her child: she has not been watchful enough, she thinks; and while she was unheeding, some evil thing had entered into her baby and driven out the fair soul with which he began. Perhaps he called me and I was dumb. Unconcerned I sat and heard Little things, Ivy tendrils, a bird's wings, A frightened bird-- Or faint hands at the window-pane? And now he will never come again, The little soul. He is quite lost. She tries to woo him back, with prayer and incantations; but he will not come; and when at last she is worn out with waiting, she seeks an old wizard and begs him to give her forgetfulness. But it is a hard thing that she is asking: it needs a mighty spell to make a woman forget her son; and the mother has to go without the boon. She has not wealth enough in the world to pay the Wise Man's fee. But afterwards she is glad that she was too poor to pay the price: Because if I did not remember him, My little child--Ah! what should we have, He and I? Not even a grave With a name of his own by the river's brim. Because if among the poppies gay On the hill-side, now my eyes are dim, I could not fancy a child at play, And if I should pass by the pool in the quarry And never see him, a darling ghost, Sailing a boat there, I should be sorry-- If in the firelit, lone December I never heard him come scampering post Haste down the stair--if the soul that is lost Came back, and I did not remember.