MRS. STODDARD'S POEMS
the selected verse of many years, are arranged so as to show very well the modes and moods of work that is the more effective for its compression within a limited range. The earlier division conveys its writer's memories, and is imbued with that "pathetic fallacy" which relates nature and even the decaying structures of man to one's own feeling and experience. A melancholy bred of the passing away of kindred, and of early associations, informs them. Their passion for nature is strong and true; and this is quite in keeping with the secret of "The House of Youth" and "The House by the Sea." In these, and throughout Mrs. Stoddard's verse, a thought is sometimes directly, but not didactically, stated, and stays with the reader, through an instinctive felicity of word or phrase. In "The House of Youth" she says:
The wind beats at the door,
But never gets an answer back again,
The silence is so proud;
and again,
Man lives not in the past;
None but a woman ever comes again
Back to the "House of Youth."
Of November, she says:
The naked, silent trees have taught me this—
The loss of beauty is not always loss!
The last line has its corollary in a later reference to autumn:
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