One may confide to the world by means of art what he would not reveal to his closest friend, and yet keep inviolate his spiritual selfhood; but to withhold this disclosure, to become but a poet of externals, is to abrogate one’s claim to speak at all; for a life, however meagre, has something unique and essential to convey, and while one delights in the artist observation, the vivid pictorial touch, it must not be divorced from the subjective. The poems of Miss Hall are happily blended of the objective and subjective; here, for illustration, is a lighter note bringing one in thrall to that seductive, tantalizing charm, that irresistible allurement, of the Vita Nuova of the year: I try to fix my eyes upon my book, But just outside a budding spray Flaunts its new leaves as if to say, “Look!—look!” I trim my pen, I make it fine and neat; There comes a flutter of brown wings. A little bird alights and sings, “Sweet!—sweet!” O little bird, O go away! be dumb! For I must ponder certain lines; And straight a nodding flower makes signs, “Come!—come!” O Spring, let me alone! O bird, bloom, beam, “I have no time to dream!” I cry; The echo breathes a soft, long sigh, “Dream!—dream!” The beautiful lyric, “Ah, worshipped one, ah, faithful Spring!” tempers this blitheness to a pensive strain, though only as one may introduce a note of minor in a staccato melody. In another bit of verse celebrating the renewing year, and noting how joy lays his finger on one’s lips and makes him mute, occur these delicate lines: Thrice happy, oh, thrice happy still the Earth That can express herself in roses, yea, Can make the lily tell her inmost thought! One nature lyric of two stanzas, despite the fact that its cadence halts in the final couplet, is compact of atmosphere; and to one who has been companioned by the pines, it brings an aromatic breath, full of stimulus: The sun in the pine is sleeping, sleeping. The drops of resin gleam…. There’s a mighty wizard with perfumes keeping My brain benumbed in a dream! The wind in the pine is rushing, rushing, Fine and unfettered and wild…. There’s a mighty mother imperiously hushing Her fretful, uneasy child! These lines give over pictures of mornings in the radiant sunlight of the North, that cloudless, lifted air; and “The drops of resin gleam,” has the same touch of transmutation that some suggestion of the brine has for the exiled native of the seaboard. Miss Hall’s themes are not sought far afield, but bring, in nearly all the poems, a hint of personal experience; nature, love, spiritual emotion, blending with lighter moods and fancies, comprise the record of the _Age of Fairygold_. We have glanced at the nature verse; that upon love is subtler in touch, but holds to the intimate note distinguishing all of her work. The second of these stanzas contains a graphic image: