Oscar W. Firkins

“ Coates; but a single trait—the precision of her motives—defines and establishes her modernity. The sparing touch is likewise modern, but the kinships of "A Lark Went Singing" are mostly heirships in the innocent and worthy sense, and the long, shapely lines globe themselves into a kind of parallelism with the more spreading and orbicular rhythms of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. The heart dilates with the voice, and an emotion, powerful but tractable, informs the line of its steadfast, liberal, pervasive presence. ”

“ The same anomaly appears in these narratives and monologues in which story is subordinated to picture. It is as if a man professed to drink strong waters merely for the sake of the sparkle in the glass and then insisted that the true sparkle was obtainable only from the fieriest liquors. ”

“ Miss Burr writes monologues in which piety and sex combine or alternate, and the religious and the sexual impulses seem amicable, almost sisterly. In these points every nature has its own decorum; there is no evil in the poems, but an apple is mushy at the same stage of plasticity at which a pear is only mellow, and Miss Burr's affinities are with the hardier fruit. ”

“ She has not renounced the safety of the castle, but her favorite walk is the parapet overlooking the unploughed heath and the brigand-haunted forest.
"Life and Living" hardly crowns the hopes aroused by "In Deep Places." ”