could be comforted by "memories of her Italian travels". Death and legacy She died suddenly while on Appledore Island. She was buried not far from her cottage, which burned in the 1914 fire that destroyed The Appledore House hotel. The Kittery Point home stayed in the family until the 1989 death of her granddaughter and biographer, Rosamond Thaxter. In 2008, The Library of America selected "A Memorable Murder" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime. Themes Several of her poems are noted for their lesbian themes. Thaxter's "Two Sonnets," addressed to a woman, parallels the romantic passion present in Wharton's sonnet sequence "The Mortal Lease," addressed to a man. Thaxter frequently brings together natural imagery and romantic desires; in the poem "Alone," she writes "I would have given my soul to be That rose she touched so tenderly!" Thaxter has done for the sea-shore and the varied aspects of ocean views and the rocky isles of her home, what Whittier has done for the milder aspects of the river on whose banks he dwelt. As he may be said to have exhausted the descriptive beauties of the Merrimac, Thaxter appears to have left nothing unsaid of the varying features of the ocean, whose waves were forever beating at her feet. With the minutest attention to detail; with the keenest observation for shades of difference; with an almost superfine susceptibility to climatic and meteorological changes, so that she might be termed a realist in word-painting, she at the same time possessed the glow and the imagination of the impressionist. Thus we see in her art the happy combination of the two schools. Certainly no one can read her poems without the conviction of certainty that she had seen with her own eyes what she described. There is something beyond the photographic accuracy of experienced observation always to be observed even in her simplest poems. She saw something more than the mere external forms of nature, and however much she may have delighted in these, it was not her sole object to reproduce them for other eyes. Beyond and within the external, she perceived the actuating soul: and it was this quality which gave the greatest value to her pictures of sea and shore. Because Thaxter wrote so well of the sea, her graphic imagery impressed some critics with the idea that she wrote of nothing else. This was