I see again her drooping figure with some trail of gossamer bewitchment clinging about or drifting after her. Although her body spoke of a fastidious and sedulous care in keeping with her essentially aristocratic nature, she was merciless in the demands she made upon it, and this was the direct cause of her loss of health. The keen and shining blade of her spirit too greatly scorned its scabbard the body, and for this she paid the uttermost penalty. Her death was tragic. Full of the desire of life she yet was forced to go, leaving her work all unfinished. Her last year was spent in exile at Saranac Lake. From her window she looked down on the graveyard--"Trudeau's Garden," she called it, with grim-gay irony. Here, forbidden the work her metrical study entailed, these poems grew--flowers of a battlefield of the spirit. But of her passionate revolt against the mandate of her destiny she spared her family and friends even a sign. When they came to cheer and comfort her it was she who brought them cheer and comfort. With magnificent and appalling courage she gave forth to them the humor and gaiety of her unclouded years, saving them even beyond the end from knowledge of this beautiful and terrible testament of a spirit all unreconciled, flashing "unquenched defiance to the stars." This collection of her verse is of her own choosing, arranged and prepared by her own hand. She wrote gay verse in the earlier days before the shadow fell upon her, but her rigorous regard for unity banished it from this record of the fearful questioning of her spirit. This "immortal residue" is full of poignancy and power. The heart is stricken with her own terror at the approach of "The despot of our days the lord of dust." The book which is her funeral urn will be found to hold more than the ashes of a personal passion, it contains "Infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn." Claude Bragdon. Rochester, N.Y. October 1915. PREFACE Adelaide Crapsey was, over a term of many years, an eager student of the technical aspects of English poetry. She died on October eighth 1914, after having completed two-thirds of her _Analysis of English Metrics_--an exhaustive scientific thesis relating to accent--which, years before, she had planned to accomplish as her serious life work. Though her mind was intensely preoccupied with the technical and analytical aspects of prosody, still the creative, artistic side of her nature was so spontaneously alive, that she accomplished a very considerable volume of original poetry--almost as a by-product of her study in metrics.