Man from the blindness attaining the succor of sight, God from his glory descends to the shape we can see; Life, like a moon, is a radiant pearl in the night Thrilled with his beauty to beacon o’er forest and sea; Life, like a sacrifice laid on the altar, delight Kindles as flame from the air to be fire at its core! Joy, joy, joy in the deep and the height! Joy in the holiest, joy evermore, evermore! II LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE MISS LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE is an Elizabethan, not by affectation, but by temperament. Sidney and Lovelace and Herrick and Marlowe are her contemporaries, though she moves among them as a gray-robed figure among gay cavaliers and knights, so restrained is her mood, so delicate in its withholding. Her first collection is aptly named, _A Handful of Lavender_, for the fragrance of the elder time pervades it impalpably, as the scent of lavender makes sweet the linen of some treasured chest. How Miss Reese has been able, in the hurly-burly of American life, to find some indesecrate corner, some daffodiled garden-close, holding always the quiet and the glint of sunshine out of which these songs have come, is an enigma worth a poet’s solving. She is a Southern woman, which may furnish some clew to the repose of her work. There is time down there to ripen, to let life have its own way of enrichment with one. She has been content to publish three books of verse—although the first is now incorporated with the second—in the interval in which our Northern poets would have produced a half-dozen; nor does she much concern herself, when once the captive melodies are freed, as to their flight. She knows there are magnetic breezes in the common air, charméd winds that blow unerringly, and in whose upper currents song’s wings are guided, as the carrier-doves’, to their appointed goal. There is a delicate harmony between Miss Reese’s poems and their number, a nicety of adjustment between quality and quantity, that bespeaks the artist. She has the critic’s gift of appraising her own work before it leaves her hand, and thus forestalls much of the criticism that might otherwise attend it. The faculty of self-analysis would be a safety-valve to the high-pressure speed at which most literature of to-day is produced—but, alas, the few that employ it! “Open the throttle and let it drive!” is the popular injunction to the genius within, and wherever it drives, one is expected to follow. How refreshing it is, then, to come upon work with calm upon it!—work that came out of time, culture, and artist-love, and trusts its appreciation to the same standards. [Illustration: Lizette Woodworth Reese]