They show in technique, also, Miss Reese’s firmer, surer touch and greater clarity. There are certain sonnets in _A Handful of Lavender_, such as “A Song of Separation,” and “Renunciation,” warmer in feeling than the later ones and equal to them in manner; but in general the mechanism is much more apparent—one _does_ occasionally see the wires, which is never the case in the later work. “The Look of the Hedge,” or these lines called “Recompense,” will illustrate the ease and lucidity of her sonnets in _A Quiet Road_: Sometimes, yea, often, I forget, forget; Pass your closed door with not a thought of you, Of the old days, but only of these new; I sow; I reap; my house in order set. Then of a sudden doth this thing befall, By a wood’s edge, or in the market-place, That I remember naught but your dead face, And other folk forgotten, you are all. When this is so, oh, sooth the time and sweet! And I, thereafter, am like unto one Who from the lilac bloom and the young year Comes to a chamber shuttered from the street, Yet heeds nor emptiness nor lack of sun, For that the recompensing Spring is near! There are excellently wrought sonnets in the first volume, indeed, the majority of them are not without fine lines or true feeling, but the gain in command of the form has been marked. When all is said, however, one comes back to _A Quiet Road_ for the songs it holds, and for these he treasures it. Miss Reese has epitomized, in her lines “Writ In A Book Of Elizabethan Verse,” her own characteristics under those of the earlier singers, sounded the delicate notes of her own reed, when she says: Mine is the crocus and the call Of gust to gust in shrubberies tall; The white tumult, the rainy hush; And mine the unforgetting thrush That pours its heart-break from the wall. For I am tears, for I am Spring, The old and immemorial thing; To me come ghosts by twos and threes, Under the swaying cherry-trees, From east and west remembering. O elder Hour, when I am not, Gone out like smoke from road and plot, More perfect Hour of light and dew, Shall lovers turn away from you, And long for me, the Unforgot! Surely they will, for clear, pure song keeps its vibrancy, and the note to which is set the quaintness of such words as these in Miss Reese’s poem “A Pastoral,” will not easily be forgotten: Oho, my love, oho, my love, and ho, the bough that shows, Against the grayness of mid-Lent, the color of the rose! The lights o’ Spring are in the sky and down among the grass; Bend low, bend low, ye Kentish reeds, and let two lovers pass! The plum-tree is a straitened thing; the cherry is but vain; The thorn but black and empty at the turning of the lane; Yet mile by mile out in the wind the peach-trees blow and blow, And which is stem and which is bloom, not any maid can know.