In the poem called "At Evening," in which the poet can be so preposterous as to say,

"Twilight steals Great stealthy veils of silence over all,"

occur the following lines, full of the tranquil sweetness and the delicacy of feeling characteristic of Mr. Piatt's best mood:—

"O, dear to me the coming forth of stars! After the trivial tumults of the day They fill the heavens, they hush the earth with awe, And when my life is fretted pettily With transient nothings, it is good, I deem, From darkling windows to look forth and gaze At this new blossoming of Eternity, 'Twixt each To-morrow, and each dead To-day; 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 only come from the patient industry of true art, and from which we gather more hope for the poet's future than from anything else in the present book:—

"The old man took the blow, but did not fall,— Its weight had been before. The land was sold, The mortgage closed. The winter, cold and long, (Permitted by the hand that grasped his all, That winter passed he here,) beside his fire, He talked of moving in the spring....

"In the spring, When the first warmth had brooded everywhere, He sat beside his doorway in that warmth, Watching the wagons on the highway pass, With something of the memory of his dread In the last autumn."



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