There is always a praying angel and an evil dwarf on either side. The black abyss attracts her yet she is softened by a child's caress. She laughs at the blackest calamities that threaten her, but weeps over thin, wan children without bread. Her whole life goes into song. The boy criminal on the street fascinates her and she would kiss him. She writes of jealousy as a ghost of vengeance. If death comes, she fears "that the haggard doctor will dissect my naked corpse," and pictures herself dying on the operating-table like a stray dog and her well-made body "disgraced by the lustful kiss of the too eager blade" as, "with sinister smile untiring, they tear my bowels out and still gloat over my sold corpse, go on to bare my bones, and veins at will, wrench out my heart," probe vainly for the secrets of hunger and the mystery of pain, until from her "dead breast gurgles a gasp of malediction." Much of her verse is imprecation. "A crimson rain of crying blood dripping from riddled chests" of those slain for liberty falls, on her heart; the sultry factories where "monsters, of steel, huge engines, snort all day," and where the pungent air poisons the blood of the pale weaver girls; the fate of the mason who felt from a high roof and struck the stone flagging, whose funeral she attends, all inspire her to sing occasionally the songs of enfranchised labor. Misery as a drear, toothless ghost visits her, as when gloomy pinions had overspread her dying mother's bed, to wrench with sharp nails all the hope from her breast with which she had defied it. A wretched old man on the street inspires her to sing of what she imagines is his happy though humble prime. There is the song of the pickaxe brandished in revolution when mobs cry "Peace, labor bread," and in mines of industry beneath the earth. She loves the "defeated" in whose house no fire glows, who live in caves and dens, and writes of the mutilation of a woman in the factory machinery. At eighteen years "a loom, two handsome eyes that know no tears, a cotton dress, a love, belong to me." She is inspired by a master of the forge beating a red-hot bar, with his bare neck swelled. He is her demon, her God, and her pride in him is ecstasy. She describes jealousy of two rival women, so intense that they fight and bite, and the pure joy of a guileless, intoxicating, life-begetting first kiss. She longs for infinite stretches of hot, golden sand, over which she would gallop wildly on her steed; anticipates an old age of cap and spectacles; revels in the hurricane, and would rise in and fly and whirl with it adrift far out in the immensity of space. She tells us, "Of genius and light I'm a blithe, millionaire," and elsewhere she longs for the everlasting ice of lofty mountains, the immortal silence of the Alps; sings of her "sad twenty years," "how all, all goes when love is gone and spent." She imagines herself springing into the water which closes over her,