Helen Gray Cone

The New York Times received it well, saying, "Miss Cone has the rare talent of compression and the wit not to attempt too high a flight at first.

Stephenson Browne commented in the New York Times: "Miss Cone refrains so steadfastly from the arts of the self-advertiser that only those who read all the magazines know how large is the volume of genuine poetry she annually presents in the best of them.

"[7] A poem from the book, "The Common Street," was published in the Times the following year; it praises the sunset which bursts suddenly into the New York landscape, turning the common street and its denizens, "Each with his sordid burden trudging by," into "A golden highway into golden heaven, / With the dark shapes of men ascending still.

In addition to poetry and fiction, she wrote literary criticism (her 1890 history of American literature was republished in a 2000 anthology[9]), co-edited Pen-Portraits of Literary Women with Jeanette L. Gilder (New York: Cassell, 1887) and provided notes for Houghton Mifflin's Riverside editions of Shakespeare's Macbeth (1897), Hamlet (1897), Merchant of Venice (1900), and Twelfth Night (1901).

[1] Cone was frequently called upon to read occasional poems at college functions, from her student days into her retirement.