14
they have a tale to indicate or a meaning to imply, their expression were hat less indistinct, it must be remembered that a certain suggestive indistinctness—an indistinctness veiling while it reveals, in itself a true poetic quality—is an innate particularity of the author's style and a concomitant cause of much of its attractiveness. Another particularity is that she keeps her readers sympathising with her even while she is saying what in itself is outside their sympathy.'
The Independent (Dublin), January 11, 1892. (Katharine Tynan.)
'In Mrs. Piatt's poetry there is nothing artificial to complain of. Exquisite art there often is, but there is naturalness sometimes almost poignant, the nature of one counting time by heart-throbs. America has produced no such woman in poetry as Mrs. Piatt, and on this side of the Atlantic there are few women, indeed, who could be ranked with her. She has done what no woman of the Eastern Continent, old as it is, has done. She has expressed the poetry of womanhood. One would imagine that such an old cry in the hearts of women, that some woman would have uttered it in verse; but we have had mo adequate expression of it. Mrs. Browning essayed it, indeed, but touching the string was at her weakest, as she always was when unrestrainedly impassioned. Mrs. Piatt has passion, intense, but not tense like Mrs. Browning's, when the string was touched too sharply; and except in the sonnets and a few other exceptions, when was she capable of restraint in her art? . . . Mrs. Piatt is as chary of elaborating her thoughts as Heine; and she is wise, for she has always a thought so simple and direct that to explain it is to attenuate its quality. Her metres, too, are as simple as those of the German lyrics. . . . This saddest of all the Muses is not so far removed from laughter: for example, two of the prettiest poems in this little blue and white book are quaintly and delicately humorous.'
Mrs. L. C. Moulton's London letter in Boston (U.S.A.) Herald.
'There are always two notes in Mrs. Piatt's work—the note of passion and the note of mystery. She writes out of her heart, and she sees sights unseen by others and hears sounds to which other ears are deaf. . . . I must give you just one more poem, which plays at being what a child thinks as he looks at the state of things in this Happy Island—at the idle people who do nothing and have everything, and the working people, who do everything and have nothing ["His Argument"].'
The Cork Examiner.
'The temptation to further quote from this delightful little volume is strong.
London:
T. FISHER UNWIN, 11 Paternoster Buildings, E.C.
