Woman of the Century/Edith Matilda Thomas

THOMAS, Misa Edith Matilda, poet, born in Chatham. Ohio, 12th August, 1854. Her family moved to Kenton, Ohio, where they lived in 1858 and 1859. In 1860 they moved to Bowling Green, Wood county. Ohio, where they remained till her father died, in 1861. After his death. Mrs. Thomas, with her two daughters, Edith and Nena. moved to Geneva, Ohio, where they remained till her death, in 1887. Edith was educated in the normal school in Geneva, and encouraged by her mother to develop the poetical faculty, which she had displayed from childhood. While she was yet a student, several of her poems were published in Ohio newspapers, and they were widely quoted. Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson was impressed by her poems, and she introduced Miss Thomas to the editors of the "Atlantic Monthly" and the "Century," and she became a contributor to those and other magazines. In 1885 she published her first volume of verse, entitled a "New Year's Masque, and Other Poems. " In 1 686 she published in a volume a series of prose papers, entitled "The Round Year." In 1887 she published her second volume of verse, "Lyrics and Sonnets," and still later, "The Inverted Torch." EDITH MATILDA THOMAS. In 1888 she went to New York, and her home is now in that city. She is one of the most popular of American poets. Her work is now in constant demand, and she is a regular contributor to a large number of periodicals. Her poems are marked by sweetness, delicacy and fine finish. She polishes carefully and thus escapes the crudities that always mar the work of impulsive authors, who claim to sing as the birds sing, and who fail, in spite of their possession of genius, simply because they do not supplement talent with careful work.