This very giving of herself to the claims of the college hampered,
to a certain extent, her poetic creativeness; the volumes that
she has left are as few as they are precious, every one "a pearl."
Speaking of these poems, Miss Scudder says: "And in her own
verse,--do we not catch to a strange degree, hushed echoes of
heavenly music? These lyrics are not wholly of the earth: they
vibrate subtly with what I can only call the sense of the Eternal.
How beautiful, how consoling, that her last book should have been
that translation, such as only one who was at once true poet and
true scholar could have made, of the sweetest medieval elegy
'The Pearl'!" And Miss Bates, in her preface to the posthumous
volume of "Folk-Ballads of Southern Europe", illumines for us
the scholarship which went into these close and sympathetic
translations:

"For the Roumanian ballads, although she pored over the originals,
she had to depend, in the main, upon French translation, which
was usually available, too, for the Gascon and Breton. Italian,
which she knew well, guided her through obscure dialects of Italy
and Sicily, but Castilian, Portuguese, and Catalan she puzzled out
for herself with such natural insight that the experts to whom
these translations have been submitted found hardly a word to
change. 'After all,' as she herself wrote, 'ballads are simple
things, and require, as a rule, but a limited vocabulary, though
a peculiarly idiomatic one.'"

Not the least poetic of her books, although it is written in prose,
is the delicate interpretation of St. Francis, written for children
and called "God's Troubadour."