beauty. She lived intensely in this work, and the spirit of the theory which led her was something like this: That just as there are those with a genius for learning or for the arts, so there are those others who have a genius for contacting a subtler reality. And this reality has not to do with ethics nor any system of religion, but rather with a special grace of perception of certain intangible aspects of being. Such people, questioned, have no intellectual replies, because their apprehension in this respect is not an intellectual process. The only possible method to arrive at this area of their contact is to share in that perception. Now, in music, in color, in pure form this special divination is recognized and allowed, and wisdom in music, color or form may be imparted only if the student has the discernment to contact such beauty. But in the domain of the spirit, common opinion which respects the inner faculty of the musician or the artist, permits no specialism. Nevertheless, these specialists, as Balzac named them, for ages, here and there in the world, have pursued their lives of immediate contact with an inner flame. To some extent, all creative effort partakes of their faculty. Sometimes they have tried to picture it, sometimes they have written of vi PREFACE it. Recently color and music and geometry have expressed some of its borders. And of those who have tried to catch its faint presence in verse are the poets whom Irene Hunter* has chosen to spin the substance of her book. Preeminently she was one to assemble these poems, because she herself contacted truth in this exquisite way. As the antennæ of the radio draw sound, and as the new science extracts electricity from the air, so she distils from delicate interstices those values which, for eyes like hers, burn and vanish, but leave their aroma. Of such aromas she has made her anthology, as she has made her life. ZONA GALE *Irene Louise Hunter, 1885-1924. Daughter of William Armstrong Hunter, D.D., Ph.D., and of Eliza Chambers Hunter. Born in Toronto; A.B., Colorado College, 1909. Her successive ambitions, music, missionary career, the teaching of Spanish, literature, were in turn blocked by invalidism. For fifteen years a resident of Riverside, California. vii |