m the Book of Myths_ is made up of work of that sort, every
poem in it being full of the beauty of phrase and melody of which Mr.
Carman alone has the secret. The finest poems in the book, barring the
opening one, "Overlord," are "Daphne," "The Dead Faun," "Hylas," and
"At Phaedra's Tomb," but I can do no more here than name them, for
extracts would fail to reveal their full beauty. And beauty, after all
is said, is the first and last thing with Mr. Carman. As he says
himself somewhere:

The joy of the hand that hews for beauty
Is the dearest solace under the sun.

And again

The eternal slaves of beauty
Are the masters of the world.

A slave--a happy, willing slave--to beauty is the poet himself, and the
world can never repay him for the message of beauty which he has
brought it.

Kindred to _From the Book of Myths_, but much more important, is
_Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics_, one of the most successful of the
numerous attempts which have been made to recapture the poems by that
high priestess of song which remain to us only in fragments. Mr.
Carman, as Charles G. D. Roberts points out in an introduction to the
volume, has made no attempt here at translation or paraphrasing; his
venture has been "the most perilous and most alluring in the whole
field of poetry"--that of imaginative and, at the same time,
interpretive construction. Brief quotation again would fail to convey
an adequate idea of the exquisiteness of the work, and all I can do,
therefore, is to urge all lovers of real poetry to possess themselves
of _Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics_, for it is literally a storehouse of
lyric beauty.

I must not fail here to speak of _From the Book of Valentines_, which
contains some lovely things, notably "At the Great Release." This is
not only one of the finest of all Mr. Carman's poems, but it is also
one of the finest poems of our time. It is a love poem, and no one
possessing any real feeling for poetry can read it without experiencing
that strange thrill of the spirit which only the highest form of poetry
can communicate. "Morning and Evening," "In an Iris Meadow," and "A
letter from Lesbos" must be also mentioned. In the last named poem,
Sappho is represented as writing to Gorgo, and expresses herself in
these moving words:

If the high gods in that triumphant time
Have calendared no day for thee to come
Light-hearted to this doorway as of old,
Unmoved I shall behold their pomps go by--