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Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life

Is come, my love is come to me.

Now the force of this poem is only secondarily in its emotional quality. The really remarkable thing to note about it is that every line, except the last two lines of each stanza, making the emotional application, contains a beautiful natural object, carved and gilded, as it were, in words. Out of Keats's "Eve of Saint Agnes," there is no such example in English of words used in decorative basrelief with at once such richness of color, such concrete contour, and with such an evocation of feeling from the whole collocation of lovely things.

You will say, naturally, that it is a far cry from these lofty illustrations to "Curly Locks," but is it? Of course, "Curly Locks" is not a great poem like "A Birthday" or "The Eve of St. Agnes"; but I would claim for it, in a humble degree, an excellence in kind, and maintain that it, and many other examples of popular verse, survive on account of their employment of objects in themselves beautiful, dramatic, or in some way humanly attractive.

It is surely unnecessary to labor the point of all that is done in the evocation of a girl's beauty in the two words "Curly Locks." "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair," the hair of Melisande, that glory of a woman's hair to which even St. Paul was not blind, all manner of "love-locks" and "perilous hair," from all time to all eternity, is hinted at in those two words. Also they draw the comely rest of "Curly Locks" in an instant alluring picture. We have all dreamed of "Curly Locks." That is much to do in two words, but it is done constantly in popular poetry.

Then, in the next line, how swiftly the drama between the lot of "Curly Locks' and the lot offered her by her lover is indicated. If there are two things human beings hate doing, they are washing

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dishes and feeding swine. Certainly one cannot imagine a harder lot for a beautiful girl-with such hair, too." But mark the swift contrast of opportunity offered by her lover. She "shall sit on a cushion, and sew a fine seam"-the eternal dream of silken idleness-she shall be a fine lady seated at her window, languidly drawing her needle through her embroidered linen, as the swinefeeding and dish-washing world goes by; and she shall do what heretofore only her masters and mistresses ever dreamed of doing, she shall "feed upon strawberries, sugar, and cream.' The symbolic use of the words "strawberries and cream" is well enough understood by advertising restaurateurs. Few collocations of words express so much of average human felicity. Without having herded swine or washed dishes, it ought to be easy to any natural person to understand the power of the climax in these four simple, popular, despised, and immortal lines. And "strawberries and cream" recall me to the tarts which the Queen of Hearts made all on a summer day. Anything picturesque to eat is always useful in popular poetry, and even Keats, "him even,' made wonderful use, as we know, in his high artistic sphere, of that "strawberriesand-cream" motive, when, in "The Eve of St. Agnes," Porphyro brought to the sleeping Madeline:

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VOL. CXXXVI.-No. 811.-11

A Midwinter-Night's Dream

BY MARGARITA SPALDING GERRY

DOROTHY had no fault to find with her life at all. How could she find fault? Wasn't she doing just what she had been preparing to do? Wasn't she gloriously independent-the mistress of just the charming little bachelor apartment that she had planned to have, possessed of more girl friends than she could make after-office engagements with, earning the largest salary of any of the girls in her class, healthy and happy and busy with perfectly delightful work? Jack Penfield called this having her own way, but she knew it was just doing the thing she could do best. And that was what her class in the final class-meeting had solemnly agreed was what every woman should choose to do. And if one had no real taste for domesticity why should one attempt it?

As will be seen from this, Dorothy had few childish weaknesses left.

"If I have one," she said to herself, pursuing some train of thought that the sight of Christmas trees stacked up against the window of a florist started in her, "it is for dressing dolls."

Trains of thought can sometimes carry one farther than trains of cars. Perhaps this one was speeded up by a glimpse of a little child mother on the Fifth Avenue bus hugging a befrilled and staring bisque daughter by that and the thought of other children whose legs were too thin and whose faces were too pale and eyes too full of forbidden hopes-little mothers who probably had no befrilled bisque daughters.

For all these reasons Dorothy found herself alone in her apartment on Christmas Eve after a rigorous course of rejected invitations, her home people disappointed-but that was, in a measure, a relief, because in her home town somebody lay in wait who was as insistent as the thought of doll-less little girls at Christmas-time.

On the table in front of Dorothy was a wonderful assortment of articles and a suit-case to pack them in. There was a particularly engaging variety of doll with short-bobbed, golden-brown hair that could be combed and "laundered," as the clerk at the shop had assured her. The doll had an eager, rosy little face and brown eyes; her knees were pink and dimpled, and she wore socks and stub-toed patent-leather slippers.

A tiny trunk, which was on the table, too, held as elaborate a wardrobe as Dorothy had been able to assemble by sewing herself, or coaxing her friends into making or by buying in the shops during the five days since her plan had occurred to her. It was a wardrobe in which pink predominated, because pink was more becoming to Penelope than blue. There were two play-dresses, a Sunday dress, a party dress, a velvet coat trimmed with narrow fur and with a muff to match, hats, underwear-very up-to-date and profusely trimmed with pink-ribbon bows-in short, there was the most complete wardrobe that any doll ever went visiting with, and all made with buttons and buttonholes or hooks and eyes or snappers so they could be put on and taken off as many times as their mother desired, even during that rapturous first day of possession when the usual commercially made outfits simply melt away at the fastenings under the constant strain.

But Penelope and her trousseau, although the most glorious of the objects. on the table, was not all. Either Dorothy had some embryo militant suffragist in view, greedy in appropriation of the rights and privileges of both sexes, or else some moderately large-sized family was destined to receive the gifts, for there were enough toys with a masculine flavor and books that could be enjoyed by either boys or girls to make the assortment a sort of accordion Christmas, warranted to expand or contract according to the domestic tune.

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