3
The Irish Monthly, July 1886.
'This woman-poet's poems come to us with a New World fresh and fragrance superadded to the sweetness and tenderness, which are among the things that never grow old. Some of the poems, in their largeness and freedom, their boldness in seizing, and crying aloud the vague doubts and marvellings which have wearied and pained us all at times, not the less that we have scarcely dared to look them in the face, read like a revelation—a revelation of one's own heart, of a woman's heart. The book is essentially a woman's book, though, in its breadth of treatment, it has often a masculine quality of strength,—it is the book of a woman who is also a wife, and the mother of children, and in the noble attributes of a developed womanliness, the poetry of it must rank almost with the highest. . . . Three women's names suggest themselves to the present writer, as those of distinct and individual singers in our own day—Christina Rossetti, Jean Ingelow, and Alice Meynell, whose one exquisite volume "Preludes," is an embodiment of the purest poetry; and to those three names Sarah Piatt's may now be added as a fourth, for her marked originality and freshness are wonderful, in an age more than a score of hundred years after Solomon bewailed the staleness of all things under the sun. The tenderness, the purity of the book, is beyond all praise; and the curious current and undertone of pathos running through the highest strain—a sadness entirely natural, and not at all a literary quality, as so much present-day sadness seems to be—gives the work an ennobling gravity. From this true, sweet poet one wishes to quote largely, feeling that the poems speak best for their own excellence; but where all is perfect, there is a difficulty in selection. . . . The poem which gives the first book its name is wise and beautiful, and "A Wall Between " contains some of the best things the poet has given us. . . . It has some wonderful passages. . . . Perhaps the short poems are the most perfect, and the style at its best is limpidly clear. . . . Any notice of this book would be incomplete, however abundant its citations, if it failed to quote from the poems concerning children, which, perhaps, more than any other feature, set the book apart from any other book we have ever read. Its insight into child-life, the naiveté of a child's thoughts, here so accurately rendered, will make the book especially lovable to grown lovers of children, though here, perhaps, it stops short; it will hardly reach the children themselves, as Hans Andersen, the prophet of children, does; but rather like Mr. R. L. Stevenson's "Child's Garden of Verses," it will make the grown reader sigh and wonder at the vivid reflection from his own childhood. . . . And now, with little further quotation, we must leave this lovely and lovable book, in which is contained the cream's cream, the best perfection of the author's work. Let all who love poetry, and happily they are many, read the -book for themselves, and know the delight we have felt in its reading. For the delicate grace of the book, the yearning sadness which fills one with a pain better than pleasure, for this laying open of a beautiful heart, we are deeply thankful. . . . We have tried to say little and quote much, because we felt how poorly we could say all the book makes us feel—one could say it, perhaps, better in verse than in prose, where enthusiasm finds hardly a fitting vehicle of expression. Only we thank the writer for the gift she has given us and the world—a gift as perfect and spontaneous as the song of a blackbird, as passionate and innocent as the heart of a rose.'
The Westminster Review, July 1886.
