much in common with the earlier and more famous "Patterns" where the narrative, the character and the thing observed are inextricably knit.

Legends (1921) is a volume closely related to Can Grande's Castle. Here are eleven stories placed against seven different backgrounds. All of them are as unusual as what the reader had come to expect of Miss Lowell; the first one must be rated among her most dazzling achievements: a tour de force with colors as strange and metallic as the scene it pictures. As in her previous books, this poet made even the most casual scene an adventure in excitement.

Miss Lowell's more recent poetry established a closer kinship with her backgrounds. Less experimental than her previous verse, such poems as "Meeting-House Hill" and "Lilacs" (to be included in What's O'Clock?, which will be published in the fall of 1925) are as tartly native as the essays of Emerson; it is her New England, as she claims in "Lilacs,” because her roots are in it. Besides Miss Lowell's original poetry, she undertook many studies in foreign literatures; she made the English versions of the poems translated from the Chinese by Florence Ayscough in the vivid Fir-Flower Tablets (1921). She also wrote two volumes of critical essays: Six French Poets (1915) and Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), both of them being invaluable aids to the student of contemporary literature. Two years after its publication she acknowledged the authorship of the anonymous A Critical Fable (1922), a modern sequel to James Russell Lowell's A Fable for Critics. Her monumental John Keats, an exhaustive biography and analysis of the poet in two volumes, appeared early in 1925.

For years Miss Lowell had been suffering from ill health; she had been operated upon several times, but her general condition as well as her continual desire to work, nullified the effects of the operations. In April, 1925, her condition became worse; she was forced to cancel a projected lecture trip through England and to cease all work. Fortunately, she had just finished preparing for the press the contents of her posthumous volume What's O'Clock? She died as the result of an unexpected paralytic stroke on May 12, 1925. Her death was the occasion of a salvo of nation-wide tributes. The very journals which had ridiculed and fought her during her life were loudest in her praise. A few editorials main

tained that her personality was more forceful and impressive than her work; the great majority, however, agreed that hers was one of the most daring and picturesque figures in contemporary literature. Like all pioneers, she was the target of scorn and hostility; but, unlike most innovators, she lived to see her experiments rise from the limbo of ridicule to the definite place which they have assumed.

A LADY 1

You are beautiful and faded,
Like an old opera tune

Played upon a harpsichord;

Or like the sun-flooded silks

Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.

In your eyes

Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,

And the perfume of your soul.

Is vague and suffusing,

With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.

Your half-tones delight me,

And I grow mad with gazing

At your blent colors.

My vigor is a new-minted penny,

Which I cast at your feet.

Gather it up from the dust

That its sparkle may amuse you.

SOLITAIRE

When night drifts along the streets of the city,
And sifts down between the uneven roofs,

1 All the poems by Amy Lowell are used by permission of, and special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers.

My mind begins to peek and peer.

It plays at ball in odd, blue Chinese gardens,

And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples
Amid the broken flutings of white pillars.

It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair, And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses. How light and laughing my mind is,

When all good folk have put out their bedroom candles, And the city is still.

PATTERNS

I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils

Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.

With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare

Pattern. As I wander down

The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured,

And the train

Makes a pink and silver stain

On the gravel, and the thrift

Of the borders.

Just a plate of current fashion,

Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.

Not a softness anywhere about me,

Only whalebone and brocade.

And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze

As they please.

And I weep;

For the lime-tree is in blossom

And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the plashing of waterdrops

In the marble fountain

Comes down the garden-paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown

Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown

So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,

But she guesses he is near,

And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.

What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!

I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground. All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,

Bewildered by my laughter.

I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his shoes.

I would choose

To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,

A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover.

Till he caught me in the shade,

And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he

clasped me,

Aching, melting, unafraid.

With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,

And the plopping of the waterdrops,

All about us in the open afternoon-
I am very like to swoon

With the weight of this brocade,

For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom

In my bosom

Is a letter I have hid.

It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke. "Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell

Died in action Thursday se'nnight."

As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,

The letters squirmed like snakes.

"Any answer, Madam," said my footman.

"No," I told him.

"See that the messenger takes some refreshment.

No, no answer."

And I walked into the garden,

Up and down the patterned paths,

In my stiff, correct brocade.

The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,

Each one.

I stood upright too,

Held rigid to the pattern

By the stiffness of my gown;

Up and down I walked,

Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.

In a month, here, underneath this lime,

We would have broke the pattern;

He for me, and I for him,

He as Colonel, I as Lady,

On this shady seat.

He had a whim

That sunlight carried blessing.

And I answered, “It shall be as you have said."
Now he is dead.