The sense of death. And then to rise again
And feel thyself bewildered, like a spirit
Out of the grave-clothes and the fragment strewings.
Passages of subtle significance, wistful, tender, and pathetic, distinguish this scene.
Miss Peabody has visualized Marlowe clearly wherever he appears, and created him as the lovable, impulsive, generous-spirited, but ill-starred
genius that he was. It is a life-study, in its conflicts, its overthrown ideals, its appealing humanity, and should take its place as one of the permanent interpretations of his character.
Many of her critics have found in Miss Peabody’s latest volume, The Singing Leaves, an inspiration and charm exceeding that of her former work, and in delicacy, lyrical ease, simplicity, and ideality it must be accounted one of her truest achievements; but there is about the volume an impalpability, an airy insubstantiality, which renders it elusive and unconvincing. The mystical subtlety hitherto noted in Miss Peabody’s work has, in the latest volume, grown, until many of the poems have so little objectivity that they float as iris-tinted flecks of foam upon the deep of thought. They have beauty of spirit, beauty of word; but their motive is so subtle, their thought so intangible, that while they charm one in the reading, they have, with a few exceptions, melted into vapor, gone the way of the foam, when once the eye has left them. One feels throughout the volume an ingenuous simplicity, a naïveté, that is, in many of her poems, exceedingly charming, but which, becoming the pervasive note of the collection, communicates to it a certain artificial
artlessness, as if June, disregarding the largess of the rose, yearned back to April and the violet; in short, the poems seem to me, with a few exceptions, to lack moving, vital impulse, and to bring few warmly imbued words from life. They are as the pale moon-flower, growing in the stillness of dreams, rather than the rose dyed with the blood of the heart.
But what is, to me, the limitation of the volume,—its over-subtilized mood and lack of definite, moving purpose,—must, to many of its readers, be granted to be its distinction; and for their very impalpability these delicate Leaves, that vibrate with impulse as ethereal as that which moves the aspen when the wind is still, have for many the greater charm.
To glance, then, at some of the finer achievements of the volume, one finds among the lyrics several turning upon love that catch in artistic words an undefined mood, such as “Forethought” and “Unsaid,” or in captivating picture-phrase, a blither fancy, such as “The Enchanted Sheepfold,” or, stronger and finer than these, that vision of love called “The Cloud,” which enfolds truth and wraps the heart in its whiteness. One can scarcely fancy a more exquisite bit of imagery in which to clothe the thought of these lines: