Greatly shining,
The Autumn moon floats in the thin sky;
And the fish-ponds shake their backs and flash their dragon scales
As she passes over them.
_Ridgely Torrence_
(Frederic) Ridgely Torrence was born at Xenia, Ohio, November 27,
1875, and was educated at Miami and Princeton University. For
several years he was librarian of the Astor Library in New York City
(1897-1901) and has been on several editorial staffs since then.
His first volume, _The House of a Hundred Lights_ (1900), bears the
grave subtitle “A Psalm of Experience after Reading a Couplet of
Bidpai” and is a half-whimsical, half-searching hodge-podge of
philosophy, love lyrics, artlessness and impudence. The influence of
Omar Khayyám and Richard Hovey is obvious but not too dominant;
Torrence saves himself on the very verge of sentimentality and
rhetoric by a chuckle, an adroit right-about-face.
Torrence’s subsequent uncollected verses have a deeper force, a
more concentrated fire. In “The Bird and the Tree” and
“Eye-Witness,” he has caught something more than the colors of
certain localities—particularly of the dark belt. They are as
eloquent and moving as his _Granny Maumee and Other Plays_ (1917),
which owe their power not only to Torrence’s gift as a poet but to
his sympathy as a folk-lyrist.