CHOICE 76 THE FIRE VASE 77 MY HUSBANDS 78 AFTERWORD, _by Edmund Leamy_ 81 FOREWORD When I took the two poems from Nathalia’s mother, and promised to read them, I had seen none of the press notices of Miss Crane’s talent. Being only a quasi-journalist I seldom read the newspapers. I am extremely skeptical of infant prodigies, and the poems of Nathalia’s that I have since seen most quoted in newspaper articles about her are just what you would expect. They prove nothing except that she is a little girl with a lively fancy. Certain poems in this first collection, however, seem to me to prove something more. Some long time ago in Scotland there was a little girl named Marjorie Fleming, and to-day a twelve-year-old, Helen Douglas Adam, the daughter of a Scotch parson and his wife of Dundee, is her successor overseas to the juvenile purple. Miss Adam has now been published both in England and America. Yet the best poems of hers that I have read do not seem to me to possess such individuality or such maturity of melody and diction as Miss Crane’s best poems. Then there is our own Hilda Conkling, whose mother is a distinguished American poet, and who writes in free verse and has published several volumes of poems. Hilda is a real poet. But she has never grappled with and conquered certain problems of poetic structure from which Miss Crane, by sheer instinct, seems to have wrested occasional victory. I took the two poems from Nathalia’s mother; and first I read _The Blind Girl_. I came upon the two verses: In the darkness who would answer for the color of a rose, Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes. * * * Oh, night, thy soothing prophecies companion all our ways, Until releasing hands let fall the catalogue of days. These lines and the meditation from which they spring were the spontaneous phrasing and the natural meditation of--a child of ten. That in itself, I think, is sufficiently remarkable. In the darkness who would cavil at the question of a line, Since the darkness holds all loveliness beyond the mere design. Strange insight for a comparative infant! In her lighter moments--and, naturally, there are a great many--Nathalia’s “heart is all a-flutter like the washing on the line”; she “could not stain romance with monetary fee”; and, when she has sat upon a bumble-bee, she knows “the tenseness of humiliating pain.” Many a grown humorist might envy the freshness of such amusing phrase. There is much laughter and nonsense in this book--that of a rather romantic little girl with a quick eye and ear and a pert fancy. But there is, as I have intimated, more than that. Cloud-made mountains towered Beckoning to me; Visionary triremes Talked about the sea.