wish to keep together the poetry she occasioned and enable those who
loved her--and they were a great many-to know definitely what she was
to me.

I think that is the truth. This is the only means I have at present of
acknowledging publicly the vast debt I owe to her.

As I turn these poems over--if they are even to be called poems--I
realize that they can never begin to express what her personality was.
The earliest ones were written by a boy who was in love, and the
latest by a man who has suddenly stepped into the dark. Those between
are fragments from the days when we were struggling along together at
the everyday tasks and outside interests and dreams that possessed us.
The war entered our lives to change them in September, 1917. The poem,
"Man Possessed," was written within sound of her actual voice, the
others all in absence from her at various times and in moods made
strange by absence.

And yet this is all I have at present to give in her memory. But I
hold by these because--though they are poor, freakish fragments as far
as any real expression of her is concerned--they were made for her.

It is even harder to express in bald prose a personality that had so
many sides, so many varying strengths, such inner sight and yet such a
forthright splendid intelligence. I have tried once to round it into
periods--and have destroyed the attempt. It is my hope that the sister
to whom she was devoted with an attachment altogether unusual to most
of us will write of her.

If I merely recount the outlines of her life, it loses her. To say