Nature is often, in her verse, as it must be to any sympathetic mind, a keener source of pain than of pleasure, instinct as it is with memories, and flaunting before one’s thwarted dreams the infallible fulfilment of its hopes; yet she has for it an intense passion, and enters into its most delicate and undefined moods with swift comprehension. “The Soul of the Violet,” previously referred to, is an illustration in point, being a purely subjective treatment of a nature-suggestion. When spring is yet too young for promise of bloom, and only in the first respite from the snow, The brown earth raises a wistful face— Whenever about the fields I go, The soul of the violet haunts me so! I look—there is never a leaf to be seen; In the pleachéd grass is no thread of green; But I walk as one who would chide his feet Lest they trample the hope of something sweet! Here can no flower be blooming, I know— Yet the soul of the violet haunts me so! Again and again that thrilling breath, Fresh as the life that is snatched out of death, Keen as the blow that Love might deal Lest a spirit in trance should outward steal— So thrilling that breath, so vital that blow— The soul of the violet haunts me so! Is it the blossom that slumbers as yet Under the leaf-mould dank and wet, * * * * * Or is it the flower shed long ago? The soul of the violet haunts me so! The subjective touch in the final couplet gives the key-note to the poem. Miss Thomas is indeed so subjective in her conception of some of the profounder and more vital losses of life, the sense of the irrevocable and irreparable is so keenly emphasized to her mind as to communicate almost a hint of fatalism to certain of her poems, such as “Expiation” and “A Far Cry To Heaven.” The latter is such an utterance, in its impassioned tone, as might proceed from the lips of the Angel with the Flaming Sword sent to bar one’s return to his desecrated Eden. The ultimate effect of such a poem, however, is salutary, as the warning outruns the scath, and one reading it will pay closer heed to the import of the “white hour” of his life. On its technical side, the poem has all the ease of an improvisation, and so at one are the metre and thought that line succeeds line with a surge and a rhythm, as wave follows wave to the shore: What! dost thou pray that the outgone tide be rolled back on the strand, The flame be rekindled that mounted away from the smouldering brand, The past-summer harvest flow golden through stubble-lands naked and sere, The winter-gray woods upgather and quicken the leaves of last year?— Thy prayers are as clouds in a drouth; regardless, unfruitful, they roll; For this, that thou prayest vain things, ’tis a far cry to Heaven, my soul,— Oh, a far cry to Heaven!