There is a northern cloud I know, Along a mountain crest. And as she folds her wings of mist, So I could make my rest. There is no chain to bind her so Unto that purple height; And she will shine and wander, slow, Slow, with a cloud’s delight. Would she begone? She melts away, A heavenly joyous thing. Yet day will find the mountain white, White-folded with her wing. * * * * * And though love cannot bind me, Love, —Ah no!—yet I could stay Maybe, with wings forever spread, —Forever, and a day. Here is delicacy enshrining one of the deeper truths of life. Many of the lyrics have a seventeenth-century lilt, but not of imitation. There are no echoes in Miss Peabody’s song, its note, measure, and spirit are entirely her own, and a random stanza would carry its identification, so individual is her touch. Of the seventeenth-century mood, however, are “The Song Outside,” “Forethought,” “The Top of the Morning,” “The Blind One,” and other poems. Nearly all the lyrics in _The Singing Leaves_ are very brief, showing, in their compactness and restrained use of imagery, just the opposite method from that prevailing in Miss Peabody’s first book, _The Wayfarers_. So marked is the contrast that, but for the personality imbuing them, they might have been written by another hand. Whereas the diction also in the earlier work inclined to beauty for its own sake, the reaction to its present simplicity is the more marked. It is doubtless for this reason that many of the poems carry with them a note of conscious ingenuousness, as if their simplest effects had been deliberately achieved. Not so, however, such poems as “The Inn,” “The Drudge,” “Sins,” “The Anointed,” “The Walk,” whose words are quick with native impulse, as the trenchant lines of the third: A lie, it may be black or white; I care not for the lie: My grief is for the tortured breath Of Truth that cannot die. And cruelty, what that may be, What creature understands? But O, the glazing eyes of Love, Stabbed through the open hands! Two poems contained in _The Singing Leaves_ are of a note far more serious and vital than that of their fellows: the first, “The Ravens;” the second, and to my thinking, the more important, “The Fool,” which from the standpoint of strength, feeling, forceful expression, idealism, and the portrayal of human nature, seems to me the achievement of the book. It holds a truth bitten in with the acid of experience: O what a Fool am I!—Again, again, To give for asking: yet again to trust The needy love in women and in men, Until again my faith is turned to dust By one more thrust. How you must smile apart who make my hands Ever to bleed where they were reached to bless; —Wonder how any wit that understands Should ever try too near, with gentle stress, Your sullenness!