“The young sun rides the mists anew; his cohorts follow from the sea.
Let Aztec children shout and sue, the Persian lend a thankful knee:
Those glad Auroral eyes shall beam not anywhere henceforth on me.
“Up with the banners on the height, set every matin bell astir!
The tree-top choirs carouse in light; the dew’s on phlox and lavender:
Ah, mockery! for, worlds away, the heart of morning beats with her.”
This she did not reclaim for the authorized last printing, and none can say whether she would let us snatch it out of its young obscurity. But it is so unmistakably one of the first trial flights of the pure lyric in her, it sings so melodiously, that the mere chronology of her work demands it. In the same book beats the haunting refrain:
“Youth is slipping, dripping, pearl on pearl, away.”
And as you are about to close the door on this virginal chamber of April airs and cloistral moonlight, of ordered books breathing not leather only but the scent of “daffodilean days,” your heart rises up, for here is The Wild Ride, a poem which first beat out its galloping measure in a dream, and continued, with the consent of her own critical mind, to the last book of all. The beginning and the end are like nothing so much as the call of youth and the answer of undaunted age. It was, one may guess, her earliest lyric runaway, the first time she lost herself in the galloping rush of a stanza’s trampling feet.
“I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses