immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. More and more mankind will discover that we turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, and to sustain us." The immortality of poetry must lie in its interpretative message, which may be given as truly in the lyric as in the ode, the little song winging its way to the heart of humanity, and resting there after the epic has been half forgotten.
Before she had found the audience that now so gladly hears her, Matthew Arnold had divined the peculiar charm and merit inherent in the poetry of Florence Earle Coates, and the closing phrase of the sentences just quoted from him suggests what that merit is. "To interpret life, to console" and "to sustain;" a gift, surely, from the gods.
The first impression of her verse gathered by the casual reader, might be that it is too grave, too austere, even, and this in spite of its constant melody and color; that amongst the supreme facts of life it recognizes pain, loss, sorrow, and death itself. But to see only this is to miss her message uplifting and glad, warm with love and light and lasting beauty. Sorrow
