WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY (1869-1910) William Vaughn Moody was throughout his life regarded as the most promising of the younger American poets. And when he died in 1810 most critics mourned for the unwritten lyrics and poetic dramas of which American literature had thus been robbed; they mentioned the author as a gifted youth, whom fate had removed at the beginning of a splendid career. To a certain extent this attitude was a tribute to the youthful spirit of William Vaughn Moody, to his vivacity, energy and cheerfulness. But it was chiefly a new illustration of the fact that nowadays poets flower late in the season. Moody was forty-one years old when he died--and there was a time when the poet of forty was considered well past the meridian of his genius. Most of the great poets established their fame before they were thirty years old--Keats and Shelley died at twenty-five and twenty-nine respectively. But nowadays the poet of forty-five is still called young and the poet of thirty our kind critics consider a precocious infant. As a matter of stern fact, it is doubtful that American literature has really lost much by Moody's death. He wrote "Gloucester Moors" and the "Ode in Time of Hesitation" and "The Faith Healer." The conscientious student of his work cannot escape the conviction that in these he gave the world all that he really had to give. Of course he would have written more--nature lyrics, poems on political and sociological questions, poetical dramas dealing with philosophical themes, prose plays of modern American life. But toward the end of his brief life his work was not gaining in force. Readers of "The Death of Eve" have little sorrow over the poet's failure to complete this play--the first two members of the trilogy which it was to conclude are nobly phrased, but they are so cloudy in thought and weak in dramatic construction that they do their author's fame little service. Prometheus, Pandora, Deucalion, Eve, Cain, Raphael, and Michael, angels and archangels, thrones, dominions and powers, were characters too mighty for the talent of this poet, who could handle adequately enough a problem of contemporary politics or draw quaint lessons from the caged beasts in a menagerie. Perhaps the coldness which annoys some readers of Moody's poems, the sense of aloofness from the common experience of mankind, the artificiality which mars such expressions of sympathy for humanity as are intended in "Gloucester Moors," are things for which it is unjust to blame the poet. His friend, John M. Manly, wrote in the preface to his "Poems and Plays": "He was an epicure of life, a voluptuary of the whole range of physical, mental, and spiritual perfections." But in Moody's poetry we find more of the mind than of the heart; we feel that we are in the presence of a charming and cultured personality, but we have no feeling of intimacy with the writer.