Page:Poems Elliott.djvu/11

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Introduction

MARTHA JULIA ELLIOTT was born in Yonkers, N. Y., July 26, 1899. She is the daughter of E. Leavenworth Elliott, Cornell 1887, and of Carrie Enz Elliott, Vassar 1891. The Hon. Frank J. Enz, of Ithaca, was her grandfather.

She has been educated in the Ithaca schools, with the exception of three years spent in study at Chappaqua Mountain Institute, a Quaker School, reflecting the old Concord traditions of "simple living and high thinking," under the able directorship of Mr. Charles R. Blenis, at Valhalla, N. Y.

She is a member of Lambda Chapter of the Mu Phi Epsilon Sorority of the Ithaca Conservatory of Music.

She will enter Cornell University, in September, 1917, in the course in Arts and Sciences.

This little girl, who took her first step in life on the first day of the new century, under the guidance of Miss Emily G. Marsh, a warm friend of the family, very early showed an aptitude for poetic expression. In fact, before she had learned to read or write, she began to commune with herself at times, in a recitative full of imaginative thought, much of which has been lost.

Her mother, however, when she found this becoming more frequent, as time passed, kept pad and pencil at hand, lest the vagrant thoughts be scattered, like the leaves of the Cumaean Sybil, and has preserved enough