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Unmeet to be profaned by praise

Is he whose coils the world enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze,

The God I never once behold: Above the cloud, beneath the clod: The Unknown God, the Unknown God.

MRS. WOODS

ALTHOUGH all her work is womanly enough; although there is no aping of masculinity about it; yet if Mrs. Woods's poems had been published anonymously, it would have taken a rather keen critic to declare with confidence that

their author was a woman. This remark has a two-edged bearing. It implies a quality and a defect. Discretion, reserve, is the quality: a very real and valuable one. Mrs. Woods writes from sublimated experience. There is no crudity of immediate outcry in her work. On the other hand-and this is the correlative defect-we feel a lack of intimacy, almost of individuality, in the utterances of this fastidious spirit. Her poems have sometimes the air of literary exercises, evidences of faculty rather than expressions of feeling. We are more conscious of their talent than convinced of their inspiration. Even when most successful, they do not strike us as inevitable. In avoiding excess of self-revelation, Mrs. Woods verges towards defect of selfexpression.

The consequence is that we turn to Mrs. Woods rather for intellectual than for emotional pleasure. There is never a laugh, never a sob, never a pulse-beat of exultation or of agony in her work. On the other hand, there is plenty of thought, contemplation, imagination, expressed in a style which bespeaks close familiarity with the best models. It needed not her strange and powerful neo-Elizabethan play, Wild Justice,

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to prove that Mrs. Woods had come very close in spirit to the seventeenth century. The cool, clear metres and delicate diction of her lyrics had already proclaimed this unmistakably. Of nineteenth-century influence one traces but little in her work; at any rate, she has not taken any individual poet for her master. Neither in style nor in thought, however, is her work affectedly archaic. It would be fairest to say, perhaps, that it shows a very wide poetic culture, with a special bent towards seventeenth-century methods, and an avoidance of evanescent latter-day fashions of verse-making. Once or twice (notably in a poem entitled Beside the Door) one seems to catch an echo from the Roumanian Folk-songs translated by Miss Alma Strettell; but this can scarcely be called a nineteenth-century influence.

The most living of all Mrs. Woods's lyrics, to my thinking, is Gaudeamus Igitur, quoted at the end of this article. Here she in some measure throws off her limitations, and gives us a large, full-throated song; emboldened, perhaps, by the semi-conventional theme, which leaves undetermined the pressure of personal conviction behind the singing. It may be absolutely sincere, it may be partly dramatic; for a pessimist may on occasion strike up "Gaudeamus igitur," a teetotaller carol "Nunc est bibendum." More characteristic, inasmuch as it is more staid and reflective, is the following poem :

TO THE FORGOTTEN DEAD.

To the forgotten dead,

Come, let us drink in silence ere we part.
To every fervent yet resolvèd heart

That brought its tameless passion and its tears,
Renunciation and laborious years,

To lay the deep foundations of our race,

To rear its stately fabric overhead

And light its pinnacles with golden grace.

To the unhonoured dead.

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