Her first volume, _The Wayfarers_, revealed at the outset a poet’s imagination, and a technique so finished that it had already the touch of the artist, but its vision was that of the novice who looks at the morning from beneath her white veil and wonders at the world of sin and strife and passion whose pain has never reached her. It was the work of one who had not yet met her revealing crisis, not yet been identified to herself, of one reaching out after truth with the filament of fancy until the ductile thread had often been spun too far before it found anchorage. The volume was, in short, an exquisite conjecture as to life, whose baffling, alluring mystery only now and again flashed upon her an unveiled glance of its eyes. This is not, however, to say that the conjecture was vain; indeed, the initial poem, “The Wayfarers,” in which, perhaps, it was most definitely embodied, is a thoughtful, suggestive song holding many truths worth pondering, and in phrasing and technique wrought with so much grace that it might stand beside any work of the later volumes. Indeed, this statement is apposite to nearly all the work in the first collection, which in that regard presents an unusual distinction, having from the first on its technical side a maturity that seemed not to belong to the tentative work of a young poet; it was, however, over-ornate, lacking directness and simplicity, and inclining to excess of elaboration in theme, so that one often became entangled in the weft of poetic artifice and lost the clew of thought. Take as a random illustration the following stanzas from the poem entitled “The Weavers,” under which Miss Peabody symbolizes the elusive hopes and fancies that come by night, weaving their weft of dreams: Lo, a gray pallor on the loom Waxeth apace,—a glamourie Like dawn outlooking, pale to see Before the sun hath burst to bloom; Wan beauty, growing out of gloom, With promise of fair things to be. * * * * * The shuttle singeth. And fair things Upon the web do come and go; Dim traceries like clouds ablow Fade into cobweb glimmerings, A silver, fretted with small wings,— The while a voice is singing low. Of the eight remaining stanzas several are equally lacking in anything that may be grasped, and while there is a certain art in imaging the elusive fancies which the weavers bring, there should be some more definite fancy or ideal to embody, rather than the mere intent to make beautiful lines. This is, perhaps, an extreme instance of the over-elaboration of the first volume, though it distinguishes the long poem which gives its name to the collection, and appears in many of the lyrics. [Illustration: Josephine Preston Peabody] Miss Peabody is an inventive metrist, and her sense of rhythm is highly developed, or rather it is innately correct, being manifest with equal grace in the first collection; witness the music of these stanzas from “Spinning in April”: