11
THE WITCH IN THE GLASS,
AND OTHER POEMS.
By Sarah M. B. Piatt.
Small Crown 8vo, Cloth, gilt top, 3s. 6d.
Published in the United States by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Boston and New York, Price $1.
The Athenæum, March 23, 1889.
'It is a pleasure to turn to Mrs. Piatt's healthy and humorous poetry. There is no need at this time of day to assert her claim to recognition on our side of the Atlantic—has not her genius been honoured by a hundred pens? and have we not ourselves already given our good word to her "Irish Garland," and to various other happy manifestations of her peculiar vein of pathos and piquancy? Mr. Howells has rightly praised her "for not writing like a man," and it is just this feminine insight, this fortunate tact in thought and phrase, that gives her verses their unique and incommunicable charm. She is no literary Medusa whose frown freezes the hapless reader into stone, but a loving, nimble-minded, sympathetic woman, with a marvellous knack of entering (like our own ever-to-be-lamented Mrs. Ewing) into the queer fancies and innocent mystifications of childhood. What could be better in this connection than the following lines, supposed to be addressed by a well-to-do urchin, surfeited with civilisation, to a tramp outside the window . . .? From "The Confession of my Neighbour"—the story of one to whom wealth came only "when her head was white," and she had lost her nearest and dearest by death or separation—we quote the last stanza, which throbs with genuine emotion, delicately suggested and (as in all Mrs. Piatt's work that we have seen) none the less effective that it is so free from over-emphasis:—
With their lost gloves and books for me to find,
Their scattered playthings and their pleasant noise!
. . . Is it here in the splendour growing blind,
With hollow hands that backward reach, and ache
For the sweet trouble which the children make!"
There is plenty of room in the world yet for verse of this quality. It is exquisitely fresh and wholesome—the unaffected utterance of one who, to use Wordsworth's delightful phrase, is "not too bright and good for human nature's daily food."
The Scotsman, December 3, 1888.
