Soft scented poems are these, delicately frail and fine, sprung from a shy and isolated soul; an expression of wistfulness, of the ache of smothered emotions. They are carefully studied, they don’t try to say or do anything original; but they sing, with musical taste and precision, a clear pure little minor tune all in the same key.

Mostly they are simply written, and in modern diction, but Miss Reese should discard of yore from her vocabulary—a convenient rhyme, in five places at least, for door or floor, but worn to shreds long since, and moreover inexactly used in such a present-tense line as

As one who comes back to a house of yore.

In a few other details also one finds this poet yielding to Victorian temptations.

Some of the portraits are delicately sketched. “A Puritan Lady,” for example, after the first two ineffectual stanzas, gives a real picture:

Humble and high in one,
          Cool, certain, different,
She lasts; scarce saint, yet half a child,
          As hard, as innocent.
What grave long afternoons,
          What caged airs round her blown,
Stripped her of humor, left her bare
          As cloud, or wayside stone?—
Made her as clear a thing,
          In this slack world as plain,
As a white flower on a grave
          Or sharp sleet at a pane?

“Spring Ecstasy”, “To Love”, “Before the Look of You”—these and other poems are faint whiffs of faded perfume—a bit trite, perhaps, like pressed flowers. Here is To Love:

Take me and break me, Love;
          Make me into a thing
More memorable than a star,
          Or a tall flower in spring.
If this you will not do,
          Down to oblivion thrust;
Into a sleek forgotten grave
          Crumble me to dust!