Baltimore Evening Sun (11 December 1911): 6.

Poets’ day! Place aux dames! And first place for the estimable, the graceful, the melodious Mrs. Rachel Q. Butts, apparently of Frederick county, in our own fiar State. Mrs. Butts is no partisan of city life: she prefers, and with good sense, her rural retirement:

My country home! again I turn My willing feet to thee, Ambition’s lofty castles to spurn And halls of revelry.

Her book of “Blades and Blossoms” (published by the hospitable Badger, of Boston, friend of all minnesingers), is of pastorals all compact. There are graceful strophes to the Spring, an elegy upon September corn, lines to white clover blossoms, four octaves to wayside roses. From the last:

’Twas a gentleman in his carriage, Out taking the morning air, And giving the reins to his daughter, He gathered the roses fair. “I’ll carry them home to your mother, My dear,” he tenderly said. “They remind me of that springtime When she and I were wed.”

AND so on, and so on, and so on. A modest, sensible poet; no mean ornament to the large and flourishing Frederick School. When we Baltimoreans think of Frederick county it is usually the pfannhaus that engages and inflames our imagination. But that lovely palatinate produces poetry, too, and some of it is full of the charm of simplicity and sincerity, as these stanzas of Mrs. Butts give evidence.

Next comes a volume of translations from the German and French, some by Bayard Taylor and some by his daughter, Mrs. Lilian Bayard Taylor Kiliani (Badger). The former are gathered from Mr. Taylor’s scattered volumes and show all of his well-known facility. The latter, in the main, are unspeakably clumsy. Here, for example, is the first stanza of Heine’s familiar “The Grenadiers,” as Mrs. Kiliani translates it:

Two grenadiers, captured in Russian campaign, Toward France were plodding aweary; And when they in Germany quarter had ta’en, Their spirits were saddened and dreary.

Here we have, in full flower, the awful style of “opera in English.” Not even “Lohengrin” has ever been worse translated.

Better stuff is in “When?” by Elizabeth Brewster (Badger). The title suggests a collection of drinking songs, but Miss Brewster’s real concern is with more serious matters. Thus she voices, with dignity and grace, a prayer for teachers:

How can I guide these, little eager feet. When mine so oft have wandered from Thy way? How can I dare Thy wondrous truth repeat With lips so stained by sin from day to day? Yet, Lord, I heard Thy loving voice say And, having heard, how can I choose but tell Of Him whose tender heart holds ample room For me, and for these little ones as well? I have no wisdom. Thine to all complete, And Thou didst bid the needy come to Thee. I come, and bring these children to Thy feet. Receive and bless them, Lord. Teach them—and me!

Not the most exalted poetry, perhaps, but still worth printing. The same discreet praise must suffice for Frank Butler, whose posthumous “Poems” (Lovell) show that he might have done really distinguished work had he lived. The best of them are love-songs. For instance:

Go, rose o’ mine, and say from me That God hath ta’en the day from me And left me blind until I see Her eyes at morn.

Go, rose, and bring her back to me, The task were not too hard for thee. Thou’rt Mary’s flower of sweet pity, Thou hast His thorn.

A palpable imitation, of course, of Edmund Waller’s “Go, Lovely Rose”—but young poets with sense enough to imitate Waller are not common enough to constitute a nuisance.

Comes now Francis Warren Jacobs, with “Mental Metempsychosis and Other Poems.” Let us open it at random. Page 120—a song of love:

This is a happy, happy time; This is a healthy, healthy clime: This is a merry, merry rime.

Fluent stuff! A burbling, bouncing bard! Another extract, this time from a song entitled “Kokogee”:

I see afar A fairy star, And in the light that streams Across the space I frame my hopes and dreams On her red face.

And so, jumping “An Urban Faun,” by Jean Wright (Badger), a collection of workmanlike things in the Munsey’s Magazine manner, and “The Voice of the Infinite,” by N. D. Anderson (Sherman-French), and “In Vivid Gardens,” by Marguerite Wilkinson (Sherman-French), we come to “The Song of the Evening Stars,” by Anna Mathewson, with caricatures by Enrico Caruso—clever jingles and clever pictures. For instance, these lines upon Oscar Hammerstein:

Only natural, perhaps, for him to like sensations, H-is initials, even, take the form of exclamations! OH! HO!

And these upon the ethereal Cavalieri, lately discharged from matrimony with the Hon. Mr. Chanler:

If Lina should ever be leaner, Our eyesight would have to be keener; She is beautiful—yes; But if “beautifully less,” We might not be sure we had seen her.

Which brings us at last to Franklin P. Adams and his “Tobogganing on Parnassus” (Doubleday-Page), a collection containing some of the best humorous verse done in our day. Mr. Adams is a newspaper rhymester, but the slipshod habit of the craft is not in him. His lightest stanzas show careful and excellent workmanship; he has an amazing command of meters; his rhymes are full of grotesque humor. Whether he attempts a burlesque popular song, an imitation of Horace, a ballade in slang or a simple quatrain, he is always ingenious and amusing. Here, for example, is his translation of Heine’s “Du Bist Wie Eine Blume,” “as it is usually done.”

Thou art like to a Flower, So pure and clean thou art; I view thee and much Sadness Steals to me in the Heart.

To me it seems my Hands I Should now impose on your Head, praying God to keep you So fine and clean and pure.

And here is one stanza of a little tribute to the fair Nethersole:

I like little Olga, Her plays are so warm; And if I don’t see ’em, They’ll do me no harm.

But space runs out and quotations must end. My advice is that you buy the book. It is genuinely clever fooling—the spirit of Gilbert and Field is in it.