Fair crystal cups are dug from earth’s old crust, Shattered but lovely, for, at price of all Their shameful exile from the banquet-hall, They have been bargaining beauties from the dust. So, dig my life but deep enough, you must Find broken friendships round its inner wall— Which once my careless hand let slip and fall— Brave with faint memories, rich in rainbow-rust! One notes in Mr. Upson’s work a restraint that is the apogee of good taste. He conveys the mood, whether of love or other emotion, and makes his feeling another’s, but the veil of the temple is never wholly rent; one may but divine the ministries and sacrifices of its altar. He is an idealist, not yet come to the place of disillusion; though wandering at times near to the border of that chilly realm, he wraps his seamless robe of dreams more closely about him and turns back. Mr. Upson is not, however, an unthinking singer to whom all is cheer because he has not the insight to enter into those phases of life that have not yet touched him; on the contrary, his note is not a blithe one, it is meditative, inclining to the philosophical, and tinctured with a certain pensiveness. Now and again the cosmos thrusts forward a suggestion which becomes the motive of one of the Octaves, as when the garden breeze loosens from the chink a … measure of earth To match my body’s dust when its rebirth To sod restores old functions I forsook,— which, in turn, induces a reflection upon the microcosm: Strange that a sod for just a thrill or two Should ever be seduced into the round Of change in which its present state is found In this my form! forsake its quiet, true And fruitfullest retirement, to go through The heat, the strain, the languor and the wound! Forget soft rain to hear the stormier sound,— Exchange for burning tears its peaceful dew! Again one has the applied illustration both of the pains and requitals that cling about the sod in its “strange estate of flesh,” in these lines declaring that Some dust of Eden eddies round us yet. Some clay o’ the Garden, clinging in the breast, Down near the heart yet bides unmanifest. Last eve in gardens strange to me I let The path lead far; and lo, my vision met Old forfeit hopes. I, as on homeward quest, By recognizing trees was bidden rest, And pitying leaves looked down and sighed, “Forget!” Mr. Upson has one of his characteristic touches in the words “old forfeit hopes,” pictured as starting suddenly before one in the new path that has beguiled him. In looking over the Octaves, which embrace a variety of themes, one doubts if his selections have adequately represented the finely textured lines, pure and individual diction, and the ripe and mellow flavor of it all.