and themes from literature as have artistic possibilities, is a strong one; nor is it one to be deprecated, except in the ultimate tendency that one shall let the inspiration from without take precedence of that within, thus quenching one’s own creative faculty. With Miss Thomas such a result is far distant, if not impossible, for life is to her the vital reality, and the majority of her themes are drawn from its passing drama; but there is also the other phase of her art, and a sufficiently prominent one to be noted. Her work falls under two distinct heads,—poetry of the intellect and poetry of the heart,—and while her most emotional verse has a fine subtlety of thought, and her most intellectual a subtlety of emotion, making them not crassly one or the other, none the less is the distinction apparent, and it is easy to put one’s hand upon the work into which her own temperament has entered and which her creative moods have shaped. Upon Art itself she has written some of her most luminous poems, holding genius to be one with that force by which
The blossom and the sod
Feel the unquiet God,
and exclaiming to a doubting votary,
Despair thine art!
Thou canst not hush those cries,
Thou canst not blind those eyes,
Thou canst not chain those feet,
But they a path shall beat
Forth from thine heart.