;
Or else, with solemn footsteps modulate
To spheral music, wander forth and know
Their radiant individualities,
And feel their presence newly, hear again
The silence that is God's voice speaking, slow
In starry syllables, forevermore."

Such thoughts as these are themselves like the star-rise described, and
shine out distinctly above the prevailing twilight of the book,
everywhere haunted by breaths of fragrance, and glimpses of beautiful
things, which cannot be determined as any certain scent or shape. For
example, who can guess this riddle?

"Come from my dreaming to my waking heart!
Awake, within my soul there stands alone
Thy marble soul; in lonely dreams apart,
Thy sweet heart fills the stone!"

It is altogether probable that here the poet had some meaning, though it
is entirely eclipsed in its expression. At other times his meaning is
not to be detached from the words by any violence of utterance; and if,
speaking of the winged steed, he says,

"When in the unbridled fields he flew,"

we understand perfectly that the steed flew unbridled in the limitless
fields. But no thanks to the poet!

Among the poems of Mr. Piatt which we understand best and like most,
"Riding the Horse to Market"--or the poet's experience of offering his
divine faculty to the world's rude uses--is in a spirit of fine and
original allegory; "September" and "Travellers" are very noble sonnets;
"Fires in Illinois," though a little thin in thought, is subtly and
beautifully descriptive, and so is "Sundown," with the exception of a
few such unmeaning lines as

"Where the still waters glean
The melancholy scene."

"The Ballad of a Rose" is lovely and pathetic; and in "Riding to Vote"
the poet approaches the excellent naturalness and reality of "The Mower
in Ohio," which is so simple and touching, so full of homelike, genuine
feeling, unclouded by the poet's unhappy mannerism, that we are tempted
to call it his best poem, as a whole, and have little hesitation in
calling it one of the few good poems which the war has yet suggested.
"The Pioneer's Chimney," which is the first thing in the present book,
is almost as free from Mr. Piatt's peculiar defects as "The Mower in
Ohio," and it is a very charming idyl. We observe in it no strife for
remote effect, while there is visible, here and there, as in the lines
below, a delicate and finely tempered power of expression, which can
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