Miss Reese’s verse shows constant affinity with Herrick, though it is rarely so blithe. It has the singing mood, but not the buoyant one, being tempered by something delicate and remote. The unheard melodies within it are the sweetest; it pipes to the spirit “ditties of no tone.” Even its least rare fancies convey more than they say, and it must be confessed that much so-called poetry says more than it conveys. Whitman’s mystical words: “All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments,” applies equally well to poetry, to poetry of suggestion, such as Miss Reese’s. Yesterday’s parted grace has been transmuted to poetry within us all, but it is a voiceless possession, speaking to us in the soul. Miss Reese’s poems, by a line or two, perhaps, put one in swift possession of that vanishing beauty within himself. It floods back, perchance in tears, but it is ours again. Take almost a random citation, for this quality is rarely absent from her poems, whether they summon Joy or Pain,—her lines “To A White Lilac”:
I know you, ghost of some lone, delicate hour,
Long-gone but unforgot;
Wherein I had for guerdon and for dower
That one thing I have not.
Unplucked I leave your mystical white feather,
O phantom up the lane;
For back may come that spent and lovely weather,
And I be glad again!