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Lizette Woodworth Reese of Baltimore, is one of America's most accomplished lyricists. She is also one of the gayest and youngest elderly ladies I have ever known. Slight, shy, with wispish gray hair and sparkling eyes, she reminds me of a kindly elfin spirit, mischievous, yet understanding. She taught in a Baltimore high school for 45 years. In 1921 she retired, beloved by generations of scholars, interested in the community and in her writing. Only recently she published a new collection of verses, Wild Cherry, which show her unflagging vitality and her great gift of choosing the soft and beautiful word, of catching a simple and ringing lilt.
I met Miss Reese only once. It was a hasty talk, in Washington, at a meeting of anxious ladies who had formed themselves into a strenuous club for the propagation of their mutual literary efforts. She seemed out of place in such a company and ill at ease. Yet she was much too kindly to voice the opinions of her fellow literati.
Her sonnet, Tears: When I consider Life and its few years— A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun; A call to battle, and the battle done Ere the last echo dies within our ears; A rose choked in the grass; an hour of fears; The gusts that past a darkening shore do beat; The burst of music down an unlistening street,— I wonder at the idleness of tears.
It is one of the most exquisite sonnets, yet, to me, this gracious woman, born in a suburb of Baltimore in 1856, living quietly now in her home town where she has spent practically all her life, is an example of a certain type of American schoolteacher, perhaps, too little heralded. There were two in my high school-a man and a woman. Both were elderly; both, noble in action and thought. Major Putney had fought in the Civil War. He had known Lincoln. His patriotism was equalled only by his love of Greek. Miss Moore was of a distinguished family. She appreciated the English language as few Americans do. She was never too tired to encourage a youngster's literary efforts, or to straighten out a tangled romance of youth that she saw developing in her class-room.
Such a woman, such a teacher, is Lizette Reese. She has not only given beauty to the world in her poetry; but she has given a vision of beauty to generations of young people. She has made the life and the living of poetry a reality to thousands.
*THE COAST OF FOLLY—Coningsby Dawson—Cosmopolitan ($2.00).