spirit to the marvelous patience, the wonderful endurance, the persistent faith, which are hidden in this nature.
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,And enters some alien cage in its plight,And tries to forget it has dreamed of the starsWhile it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
sings the poet. And
The songs of the singer Are tones that repeatThe cry of the heart Till it ceases to beat.
This verse just quoted is from "The Dreams of the Dreamer," and with the previous quotation tells us that this woman's heart is keyed in the plaintive, knows the sorrowful agents of life and experience which knock and enter at the door of dreams. But women have made the saddest songs of the world, Sappho no less than Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ruth the Moabite poetess gleaning in the fields of Boaz no less than Amy Levy, the Jewess who broke her heart against the London pavements; and no less does sadness echo its tender and appealing sigh in these songs and lyrics of Georgia Douglas Johnson.
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