real foundations of art and beauty--wonder, and man's
relation to the unknown cosmos. But Miss Jackson is not of the majority,
and has not overlooked these things. In her the ancient and unspoiled
bard is refulgently reincarnated; and with an amazing universality and
freedom from self-consciousness she suppresses the ego completely,
delineating Nature's diverse moods and aspects with an impersonal
fidelity and delicacy which form the delight of the discriminating
reader, and the despair of the stupid critic who works by rule and
formula rather than by brain. There is no medium which the spirit of
Miss Jackson can not inhabit. The same mind which reflects the daintiest
and most gorgeous phantasies of the faery world, or furnishes the most
finely wrought pictures or refined pathos and sentiment, can abruptly
take up its abode in some remote Maine timber region and pour out such a
wild, virile chantey of the woods and the river that we seem to glimpse
the singer as the huskiest of a tangle-bearded, fight-scarred,
loud-shouting logging crew sprawling about a pine campfire.

A critic has grouped the poetical work of Miss Jackson into six classes:
Lyrics of ideal beauty, including delightful Nature-poems replete with
local colour; delicate amatory lyrics; rural dialect lyrics and vigorous
colloquial pieces; poems of sparkling optimism; child verse; and poems
of potent terror and dark suggestion. "With her," he adds, "sordid
realism has no place; and her poems glow with a subtle touch of the
fanciful and the supernatural which is well sustained by tasteful and
unusual word-combinations, images, and onomatopoetic effects." This
estimate is confirmed by the latest productions of the poetess, as we
shall endeavour to show by certain specimens lately published or about
to be published, selected almost at random:

"The Bonnet" is a characteristic bit of Jacksonian delicacy and
originality. We here behold a sustained metaphor of that striking type
which the author so frequently creates; a metaphor which draws on all
Nature and the unseen world for its basis, and whose analogies are just
the ones which please us most, yet which our own minds are never finely
attuned enough to conceive unaided. The swain in the poem tells of his
intention to make a bonnet for his chosen nymph to wear. He will fashion
it with "golden thimble, scissors, needle, thread"; taking velvet from
the April sky as a groundwork, stars for trimming, moonlight for