There were strings of camels On the Tunis sands. There were certain cities Holding out their hands. Here the thing we call poetry asserts itself. The instinct for remarkable phrase and striking figurative expression is either inborn or it is not. Facility with rhyme and metre is not nearly so remarkable. But when a child can write, as in the poem _My Husbands_, I hear in soft recession The praise they give to me; I hear them chant my titles From all antiquity. it is almost uncanny. Here is, if you like, a somewhat derivative diction, but here also is true poetry by every test. He showed me like a master That one rose makes a gown: That looking up to Heaven Is merely looking down. Well, I not only wonder how she has learned simple finality of phrase so quickly; I also wonder whether she can possibly realize the philosophical implications of her best poems. As for imagery, Nathalia’s angels hearing “the hurdy-gurdies in the Candle-Maker’s Row” is an example of her fancy that quickens into imagination. She sees the Oriental bees flying “in golden convoys to the mountains of the moon,” she quizzically presents the pathos of _The Dinosaurs’ Eggs_; she has “steered by stars that sorrowed, with the moonlight in our wake”; she sees Berkley Common Like a manuscript, all yellow, and with many things deleted, Yet a manuscript completed, with embellishments most rare, Berkley Common lies forgotten, with its fields of everlasting, And the sunlight on the windows of the empty houses there. As to exactly what she is trying to say in _The Symbols_, I am in doubt, but it is hard to forget the Talmud stalking like a rabbi in a gown. On the one hand, with Nathalia, we have simply a rhyming gift turned to amusing descriptions of certain fairly ordinary episodes and characteristics of life that interest every healthily alert young lady. On the other hand, we have the beginnings of a poet with a true ear for rhythm, an eye for the color of words, and a fancy that often rises into the realm of imagination. I only hope that the young lady will continue to enjoy all the ordinary incidents of her existence as much as she has heretofore, and to perfect her technique in her spare moments. It needs perfecting. It is hardly to be wondered at that her work is still in the experimental stage. She is not yet “the youngest of the seers,” nor yet “released from fetters of ancestral pose,” but there is undoubtedly conquest of poetic beauty “waiting down the years” for her--“revisions of the ruby and the rose,” as she puts it. Read the first two verses of _The Vestal_ and marvel that a young lady of Nathalia’s age should be able to master without effort such a perfectly Emily Dickinsonian idiom. This is no copy; it is something that even Emily Dickinson would not have been at all ashamed to have written. And that is a good deal to say.