Miss Margaret H. Garrard.
Our gifted young townswoman, Miss Garrard, who has often entertained us with her rare dramatic talent, has contributed, for a number of years, articles in prose and verse to well-known magazines and journals, notably to Lippincott's Magazine and Life. In Lippincott for June, 1890, we find a very pretty poem embodying a clever thought and entitled "A Coquette's Motto". In a previous number appears "A Trip to Tophet", which is a sparkling and graphic description of a descent into a silver-mine at Virginia City, California. In it occurs the following picture of the visitor's surroundings:
"The next few minutes will always be a haunting memory to me. The long, dark passages, the burning atmosphere, the scattered lights, the weird figures of the miners appearing, only to vanish the next moment in the surrounding gloom, all recur like some infernal dream".
We select to represent Miss Garrard, the first poem she published in Life:
THE PLAQUE DE LIMOGES.
You hang upon her boudoir wall,
Plaque de Limoges!
She prizes you above them all
Plaque de Limoges!
Yet do your blossoms never move,
Although she looks on them with love,
And treasures your hard buds above
The gathered bloom of field and grove,
Insensate, cold Limoges!
Brilliant in hue your every flower,
Plaque de Limoges!
Copied from some French maiden's bower,
Plaque de Limoges!
But still you let my lady stand—
The fairest lady in the land—
Caressing you with her soft hand,
Nor breathe, nor stir at her command,
Cold-hearted clay—Limoges!
Would that I in your place might be,
Plaque de Limoges!
That she might stand and gaze on me,
Plaque de Limoges!
I'd live in love a little space,
Then—fling my flowers from their place,
At her dear feet to sue for grace,
Until she'd raise them to her face,
Happy, but crushed Limoges!