The Home Road

By Martha Haskell Clark. D. Appleton & Cos., New York.

The latest addition to the Appleton Library of Verse is a book of poems by the late Martha Haskell Clark, of Hanover, wife of Professor Eugene F. Clark '01, Secretary of the College. These poems, about sixty in number, many of which appeared originally in various magazines, have been selected from a number considerably larger to form a homogeneous whole, poems dealing with home and with the countryside, the hearth and the open road. An adequate introduction by Professor Curtis H. Page justly ranks this volume very highly when he writes: "I venture to say that, for its size and scope, no better 'Home Book of Poetry' (to borrow a familiar title) has been published for more than half a century."

High praise this, but deserved and not extravagant. If real lyric poetry is, like the great works that have stood the test of time, the rythmical expression of emotion in im- aginative language, these lyrics indeed meet the test. No one can read the title poem "The Home Road" or the poem entitled "The Inn of Wistful Thoughts" and remain unmoved. These and many others awake in the reader his own hidden and sometimes unsuspected love for the beauty that lies in the simple things of life.

Not only do these poems appeal to the universal love of the home and the out of doors, but they so well express that love in the simplest images and language that they do not weary the reader with the satiety of the oversophisticated. It is both the thought and the form, the emotion and the lyrical rythm, that make a haunting appeal for rereading, for reading aloud, for reading to those nearest and dearest. Read "Thanksgiving for the Little boys" or "Love's Wages," and understand "the home-sweet joy that makes the total much," and be thankful that Mrs. Clark brought you her "garnered treasure store of happiness."