Excerpt from Fallen Petals

The sweetest compliment that could be paid to one of my age is the expressed wish of the young author of Fallen Petals that I write the introduction to her beautiful book.

Miss Ray is an inspirational writer. She neither plans nor corrects her work. It is her wish that what she has written go hot from her heart and brain to the sympathetic soul of the reader, and I sincerely believe that her poems will enjoy a wide reading.

Her poem on the assassination of President McKinley brought to her a letter from Mrs. McKinley, expressing deep, sincere and loving appreciation. This fact alone is a valuable introduction to her book, and worth infinitely more than anything I can write.

The title of the book is itself a poem. It came to her like the poems themselves, unbidden, and she sends it forth to tell its own story.

We may interpret it to mean that, when the petals fall, the flower gives itself, fragrance and all, back to kind, loving nature, to reappear in higher and more beauteous forms, as time rushes forward with flowers and men, from a past to a future eternity.

The soul is perennial, and as its petals fall, in little gems of poetry and song like the flower, its truest conceptions re appear in other and greater souls, and the world of burdened humanity is lifted above itself into the love-lighted realms of rest and peace.

The great poetry of the world, to the mass of humanity, is written in an unknown tongue, and many of the masterpieces:

"Like quicksilver, the rhetoric they display
Shines as it runs, but grasped at, slips away."

May these little poems, fresh, from an honest young heart and life, bring blessings untold to the lives of others.

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