If the essence of Mrs. Coates's poetry is its grasp of and aspiration towards the ideal in human nature; if also it recognizes with equal intensity that man can never fully realize the ideal of life completely,—what is the specific quality, then, that so luminously quickens one's spirit, and supports one's weakening faith, and the troublesome doubts that are pressed upon one by the forces of the world.
Mrs. Coates's poetry never fails to sustain the spirit under whatever influence of distress it goes for consolation and strength to the source of her outpouring music. It is because upon the clear and positive foundation of her ideals Mrs. Coates rears the spiritual edifices of man's eternal needs. In these needs are reiterated the larger human ideals. The needs themselves flourish chiefly in the beliefs and hopes and strivings for human contentment and peace, as they express and emphasize their promptings in her poetry, instead of in that fulfilment of deed and growth which brings about a partial realization of the ideal. The edifices of man's eternal needs are shaped in her poetry out of no dream-world, are made of no symbols that float on the surface of man's changing sea of experience. They are the verities of man's mental sanity, as well as the fundamental wholesomeness and grace of physical conduct. So everywhere in Mrs. Coates's poetry, Love, Justice, and Immortality are sung, not as texts with their teachings of morality, social compensations, and philosophies of good and evil, but as the embodiments of warm and vital human traits and characteristics that afford the substantive pictures of life, becoming expressive and interpretative through the medium of lyric art.
In the sestet to the sonnet called "Earth's Mystery" is a typical attitude towards Love, which is represented as the giver of Joy:
But as I pondered, seeking, soul-oppressed,
To read the riddle of a world like this—
Where Nature still seems waiting to destroy,
I saw immortal Love descend and kiss,
With timid wonder, reverent and blest,
The quivering eyelids and the lips of Joy!
Love, the very core of earth's mystery, is also the exaltation of man's soul. Mrs. Coates's lyrics never express it on that sentimental or sensuous side which reveals the sickliness and fleetingness of passion. There is a more enduring vitality, a commoner and more infectious charm to the love she sings, because it is the voice of an emotion that strikes its roots deeper in life than physical experience. The love of the sexes may be a sort of supreme mode of this human feeling, as rendered in that fine "Song" which has sung itself into the universal heart of man:
