[In the review below, the critic praises Reese's voice as calm.]

A Quiet Road, by Lizette Woodworth Reese, has that calm, lily-scented atmosphere which always belongs to this lady's poems; she knows how to make the most of what we have that is colonial and picturesque; and this is done without straining or affectation. She even takes pains to explain in a footnote that the “Dorset levels” in the poem which follows are not transatlantic, but are only on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and that she has therefore a full right to dwell on them and theirs (p. 57):

                              “The Lavender
Woman—A Market Song.”
Crooked, like the bough the March wind bends wallward across the sleet.
Stands she at her blackened stall in the loud market street;
All about her in the sun, full-topped, exceeding sweet,
Lie bundles of gray lavender, a-shrivel in the heat.
What the Vision that is mine, coming over and o’er?
’Tis the Dorset levels, aye, behind me and before:
Creeks that slip without a sound from flaggy shore to shore:
Orchards gnarled with springtimes and as gust-bound as of yore.
Oh, the panes at sunset burning rich-red as the rose!
Oh, colonial chimneys that the punctual swallow knows!
Land where like a memory the salt scent stays or goes,
Where wealthy is the reaper and right glad is he that sows
Drips and drips the last June rain, but toward the even-fall
Copper gleam the little pools behind the pear-trees tall:
In a whirl of violet, and the fairest thing of all,
The lavender, the lavender sways by the sagging wall.
Oh, my heart, why should you break at any thoughts like these?
So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you ease;
Of Hester in the lavender and out among the bees,
Clipping the long stalks one by one under the Dorset trees.