(Qarnell Hmuetaitg Slibtarij 
 
 3tl|aca, S7et» ^orlt 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 1768.B87 
 
 Louise Imogen Guine' 
 
 3 1924 021 968 908 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021968908 
 
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY 
 
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY 
 
 BY 
 
 ALICE BROWN 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1921 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 CopYRIOHT, 1921, 
 By north AMERICAN REVIEW CORPORATION. 
 
 Copyright, 1921, 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1921. 
 
 Press of 
 
 J. J. Little & Ives Company 
 
 New York, U. S. A. 
 
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY 
 
 A STUDY 
 
 T OUISE IMOGEN GUINEY was born 
 ■^ in Boston on January 17, 1861, and died 
 at Chipping Campden, England, on Novem- 
 ber 2, 1920. Of Chipping Campden she had, 
 in 1 9 13, done, in a few strokes, a beguiling 
 little picture comforting now to hang in the 
 mind beside that stark record of her death : 
 
 It is, she says, "a stone-built paradise of 
 a village not far from Oxford. There is an 
 April wind blowing, and forty-three roses 
 adorn one cottage doorway just out of sight 
 from here. The old collie and I had a walk 
 yesterday, and I dipped my stick in Shake- 
 speare's Avon at Fledbury." 
 
 This was the woman, yet not much 
 changed in high intent and gayest vagabond- 
 age from the girl New England — and, in- 
 I 
 
deed, this western world — uniquely loved. 
 Still, to us, is she a figure of bright begin- 
 nings and the swiftest road to her is that 
 backward pathway to her youth. 
 
 Her father. General Patrick Robert 
 Guiney, a soldier of the Civil War, was her 
 exemplar and her adoration, and his death 
 an overwhelming grief. "My preux cheva- 
 lier of a father," she was proud to call him, 
 in a quick flaming up of passionate remem- 
 brance. Though he died in her girlhood — 
 and died of his wound, as it fed her ardent 
 soul to remember — she never ceased to feel 
 a living allegiance to him. Her plastic inner 
 life had been molded by him, the picture 
 her mind made of him touched Into enduring 
 colors by the manner of his death. There 
 was between them that "marriage of true 
 minds" which Is more lastingly productive 
 than the tie of blood, and she was proud if 
 you could trace In her the reflex of those 
 qualities she held highest in him: his active 
 patriotism, his slack hold on life, if It could 
 be nobly given, and a tenacity of devotion 
 to the brave fight. Of her remoter back- 
 
 2 
 
ground she says, with a pleasing touch of 
 swagger, a slightest waving of the plume : 
 
 "My grandfather and great gran', too, 
 were 'out' in the '98; and the old man had 
 been 'out' in the '45. I hope to make his 
 acquaintance in the sojer-boy's Paradise, 
 which is my bourne, if I be good." 
 
 In one of her earliest essays, "A Child in 
 Camp," she makes her bow thus, with a 
 pretty grace: 
 
 "Like the royal personages in the drama, 
 I was ushered on the stage of life, literally, 
 'with flourish of trumpets.' The Civil War 
 was at its bursting point, the President call- 
 ing for recruits: it was impertinent of me, 
 but in that solemn hour I came a-crowing 
 into the world. And since I was born under 
 allegiance, a lady whom I learned to love 
 with incredible quickness, 
 
 'ObellaLiberta! Obella!' 
 rocked my fortunate cradle." 
 
 This was Irish stock with a strain of Eng- 
 lish, Scots and French, a quicksilver blend of 
 buoyancy and happy wit, duly tempered by a 
 special potency of Gallic grace with its ap- 
 
 3 
 
prehension of the mot juste and its infallible 
 divination in forms of art. The road be- 
 tween the two boundary dates of her life 
 ran without much incident we vitally need to 
 know. Her portrait, painted here chiefly for 
 the friends who marveled at her and equally 
 at their own luck in the fortunate incident 
 of ever so slight a knowledge of her, may 
 best be done with the broad strokes of a 
 brush dipped in remembrance, against a 
 blurred background of time and place. She 
 herself, in her life of Hurrell Froude, quotes 
 the expert dictum of George Tyrrell, who 
 guessed what sort of biography is likely to 
 live longest: 
 
 "We have cause to care less for a full 
 inventory of the events which make up a 
 man's life or for the striking nature of those 
 events in themselves, than for such a judici- 
 ous selection and setting of them as shall 
 best bring out and explain that individuality 
 which is our main interest. We care less for 
 what a man does and more for what he is; 
 and it is mainly as a key to what he is that 
 we study the circumstances which act upon 
 4 
 
him and the conduct by which he acts upon 
 them." 
 
 Louise Imogen Guiney, poet, essayist and 
 scholar, was an extraordinarily limpid and 
 valiant soul, whose death seems, in no sense 
 referable to our own responsive emotion, 
 but one of bare fact and calm inevitableness, 
 a rebirth into a sort of present immortality 
 in letters, a new affirmation of response to 
 her unique accomplishment even among those 
 to whom she had become only a name out of 
 the many-syllabled past. For the last third 
 of her life she had been living in England, 
 with breaks of a few months each in Amer- 
 ica, and though the remembered vision of 
 her was not dimmed among us, still that im- 
 palpable medium made up of the day's de- 
 mands, the helter-skelter of this world of 
 disordered strivings and later the wreckage 
 of the war, had risen between her and her 
 western affiliations. The rude stumbling 
 servitors of life had crowded between her 
 and the America she loved with a passion 
 lineally her own. Time and circumstance 
 had been as remorseless to her as to us. She 
 S 
 
was, in these later years, "every day i' the 
 hour" when her somewhat unstable balance 
 of health would allow it, immersed in work, 
 the scholar's drudgery, the pain that ends in 
 perfectness: and yet it made her studious 
 delight, this rescue of half-forgotten names, 
 unwearied research upon long trails where 
 only the spirit of the born antiquary never 
 tires nor falters. The warm, persistently 
 light-hearted letters came to us less fre- 
 quently; but they came, unfailingly at Christ- 
 mas, like gay holly sprays flung from De- 
 cember to young January, as if in token of 
 the lastingness of things. She was so rare a 
 creature, our common memories had been 
 so mingled of life and laughter, that she 
 had become one of the certainties in a fleet- 
 ing and tumultuous world. We were stu- 
 pidly used to her, as you are used to sunrise 
 or a star. Then without warning the news 
 came, and the word went from lip to hushed 
 lip: "Lou Guiney is dead." That was the 
 name, Lou Guiney, as it had been in the day 
 of her youth. And at once we became 
 poignantly alive to her with a more sensitive 
 6 
 
appreciation, a new awareness. We turned 
 renewedly to her work and found in it a more 
 quickly breathing presence. We had been 
 recalled, in a shock of haste, to crown it be- 
 fore our own hands should be too lax to lift 
 the heaviness of laurel. So it was that she 
 seemed to have stepped at once into that 
 porch of continued being which is the house 
 of an immortality of love and praise, the 
 only thing the world has really to offer the 
 spirits of its dead. 
 
 To recall the form and color of her youth 
 is the eager task likely to give her oldest 
 friends their first imperfect solace. For it 
 is the pathetic human instinct to catch at the 
 mantle of time past, as if to assure itself of 
 something in the web of life that holds. 
 Those who knew her at twenty and thirty 
 need not err widely in their guess at her at 
 fifteen. For being one of that gay fellow- 
 ship for whom "a star danced" and who 
 buoyantly refuse infection from the "hungry 
 generations" that "tread" us "down," she 
 stayed, in every sense, except that of the dis- 
 ciplined mind and an acquired patience of 
 7 
 
the heart, unaffectedly young. Age, the age 
 of mere years, brutal to attack and vanquish, 
 could never, even In his ultimate assaults, if 
 they had been permitted him, have withered 
 her bright fecundities of speech and glance. 
 For there is something in a certain quality of 
 youth that will not be downed. • It is the liv- 
 ingness of a mind refreshed at wells of im- 
 mortalities. Of outward vain pretense — 
 the affectation of a persisting juvenility — it 
 is divinely innocent. You could hardly imag- 
 ine her, at any age, without her girl's grace, 
 her mystic smile. A long-legged romp in 
 petticoats far beyond the milestones when 
 childhood is apt to slink away abashed be- 
 fore oncoming desires and dignities, she was 
 early In love with the sweet seclusion of 
 books and equally with gay adventure out of 
 doors. The fields, on a day of spring, the 
 river under skies dull or bright, were her 
 abiding joys. Her "winding Charles" was 
 the young navigator's track to seas of pleas- 
 ure. She 
 
 "could not have enough of this sweet world." 
 
Those who knew her soon enough to play 
 with her the duplex game of bodily delight 
 and mental inebriety, remember hours so 
 near the wild sanity of natural life that only 
 old Arcadian names are spacious enough to 
 bound them. There was the summer day of 
 riotous vagary when she and her young chum 
 set forth to navigate the Charles, a block, 
 of ice in the boat for adventurous but un- 
 catalogued uses, and the delays and mishaps 
 of the voyage, and all the long, insect- 
 thridded night spent in the boat, the two in- 
 ventive young heads on the ice which was 
 their diminishing pillow. There was the 
 tramp across fields from Auburndale (the 
 Auburndale transmuted by James Jeffrey 
 Roche, in a gallant paraphrase, to "loveliest 
 village of the prepossessing") into an iris- 
 blue swamp, this after earnest debate 
 whether it is a more delirious fun to dash in 
 "accoutred as you are," to the ruination of 
 shoes and stockings or make the assault bare- 
 footed with skirts kilted away from the 
 blessed unction of black mud. To the ever- 
 9 
 
lasting richness of memory, it was barefooted 
 the two hoydens made their plunge, and sank, 
 with every sucking step, from sun-warmed 
 mud above to icy cool below. Wild with the 
 bliss of it they waded furiously, and the day 
 was of so ineffable a light and texture as to 
 lull them into forgetfulness of the iris itself 
 for which they had adventured, and it was 
 left behind, piles of withering beauty, en- 
 trancing, like fabrics and translucent gems. 
 Only that night were they remembered, and 
 she who was Lou Guiney wrote in magnifi- 
 cent surety : 
 
 "You shall have them in Paradise." 
 
 There was the adventure of the field, in 
 company with her dog, he "so big and so un- 
 sophisticated," and the imminence of a heifer 
 with an inherited prejudice against dogs of all 
 degrees. 
 
 "She'll chase him," said Lou Guiney, from 
 her liberality to varying events. "We shall 
 have to run for it." 
 
 There was no conceivable need of crossing 
 the field, and equally there was nothing, to 
 her simple fearlessness, in the least eccentric 
 lo 
 
in wilfully creating a situation you might have 
 to use your wits to abandon ; and so infectious 
 was her unthinking bravery that, as occasion 
 and she determined, you fought or ran. As 
 it was prophesied, so it was. The incursion 
 was made, the heifer attacked in good form, 
 the trio fled in close formation, and the safe 
 side of the fence was vaultingly attained with 
 no loss of heart but, gloriously, the guerdon 
 of a memory. All manner of robust childish 
 adventures were natural in her company. 
 Fields were made to be invaded, swamps to 
 be forded, and rivers followed until you 
 found they beat your endurance and were 
 going to make their harbor of the sea and 
 you'd have to leave them to that blest con- 
 summation and go home to supper. She was 
 Atalanta at a race in the days when a heart, 
 as yet untired, backed her to the limit. In 
 her reminiscent essay On a Pleasing Encoun- 
 ter with a Pickpocket, when my gentleman 
 had adroitly abstracted her purse and she al- 
 most ran him down, she celebrates, with some 
 just pride, "my legs (retired race-horses, but 
 still great at a spurt)." And her fearless- 
 II 
 
ness, the robust handmaid of reckless action, 
 may have been an unthinking bravado of 
 youth; equally It may have been the result of 
 a rapid fire of prayer and answer between her 
 and her defending saints. She anticipated 
 danger as little as a child. To entertain 
 suspicion was to admit evil company to her 
 inviolate mind. But, from whatever deli- 
 cately abstruse causes, she wore a brave de- 
 corum of courage, a feather in the cap, a 
 sword of high behavior. On lonely roads 
 she would walk unconcerned, her mind cours- 
 ing over the centuries, her whimsical smile 
 responsive to warnings from the more circum- 
 spect and foreboding. She was the child of 
 nature, the child of God; should she quake in 
 a world which was, though uncoveted, her in- 
 heritance? Then, as in later life, she some- 
 times seemed to be walking through "worlds 
 not realized," "whether in the body or out of 
 the body, I know not; God knoweth." And 
 this is no matter for wonder. Thin silvern 
 echoes from the past were always chiming 
 on her inward ear, majestic syllables drew on 
 her imaginings, and while she dwelt on "old, 
 
 12 
 
unhappy, far-off things" the new wine of her 
 youth and the immediate loveliness of this 
 present life mingled an intoxicating cup. 
 And suddenly the spell of the past would fall 
 from her, and she would be as irresponsibly 
 alive to the bright beauties of the challenging 
 day as a dryad on holiday out of her tree. 
 
 As a girl, she was uniquely dear to the 
 older men and women pleasurably stirred by 
 the literary event of her early blossoming 
 into essays and verse, and charmed anew, 
 when they had found her out in her shy fast- 
 nesses, by the unstudied simplicities of her 
 modest behavior. Mrs. James T. Fields and 
 Sarah Orne Jewett were hers admiringly, 
 Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, known by 
 the affectionate brevet of Godmam, adopted 
 her into a special sanctity of literary and per- 
 sonal regard, and T. W. Parsons hailed her 
 as a compeer with whom he was eager to 
 count over the pure coin out of their scholarly 
 acquisition. It was he who, in some form of 
 words not to be precisely recalled, confirmed 
 her right to legitimacy in a bright succession 
 in the arts, by telling her she was, in the 
 13 
 
genius of her, "Hazlitt's child." Edmund 
 Clarence Stedman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 
 Richard Watson Gilder, Henry Mills Alden, 
 gave her work that generous welcome the 
 noblesse of any art have in waiting for the 
 acolyte bringing the cup new filled. And les 
 jeunes, poets or pretenders, were hers to 
 command. There were banners waving; 
 only this was not in the fashion of present 
 day acclaim when a new actor challenges his 
 due. These were the dark chaplets and 
 fragrant posies the Muses love : no canopies 
 and red carpets and the blare of jazz. There 
 were individual voices, low-pitched, grave, 
 and their verdict holds. Time may have 
 snowed it under and his jealous lichen sought 
 to eat it up, but still it holds. 
 
 In those early years she published a bit of 
 work, anonymous but signalized by her 
 unique charm, and a magnate of the critical 
 world saluted it. 
 
 "Your praise," she wrote him, "is a charm- 
 ing Cinderella slipper, and here's my shy 
 foot to fit it." 
 
 To rehearse the names that were her spon- 
 14 
 
sors at this entrance Into recognition would 
 give you a brilliant list, with hardly a gap, of 
 the intellectuals of some thirty to thirty-five 
 years gone. In her simplicity of response to 
 this rare quality of praise, her genius of fancy 
 and acquisition flowing, like a magic ichor, 
 through the veins of her artless Americanism, 
 there was something as new as it was piquing. 
 She belonged to the "dewy beginnings" of a 
 fresh decade of literature, a phase authoritat- 
 ive and unique. If her head was not turned 
 by the response she got to the fine timidities 
 of her first achievement, it was because that 
 symmetrical treasury of perfectly classified 
 fact and fancy was permanently set, eyes to 
 the past, where dwell the ever-living fore- 
 runners of literary glories, the authentic 
 names that are "eternal blazon," the ex- 
 emplar and despair of lesser men. She was 
 timid, not before the contemporary critic, 
 but the great witnesses of all time — simply, 
 and in her reverent mind tremulously, a child 
 of promise, heir to those old authentic 
 glories, but not presuming on that lineage. 
 Tremendously believed in, she trod her 
 15 
 
earth lightly, yet becomingly, and carried her 
 full cup with steady hands. No taint of am- 
 bition was in her, no trace of the base alloy of 
 prize-getting and wearing. She had seen the 
 "cloud capp'd towers" of the halls of light 
 where the blessed everlastingly dwell, she had 
 guessed at the shades and green valleys, the 
 refuge of those "ordained to fail," and she 
 knew thus early, through reverent intuition, 
 that "it has become almost an honor not to be 
 crowned." Even then at the beginning, 
 when chaplets were being woven for her, she 
 might have written that later recital of her 
 secular creed : 
 
 "To fear not possible failure 
 Nor covet the game at all." 
 
 At that time the game was in her hands : the 
 game of youth and gayety and a blameless 
 resolve to make the most of it all in the only 
 way the great unseen censors, the Fates that 
 spin and weave, allow. 
 
 She was a goodly picture of girlhood, 
 
 Diana not so likely to be enamoured of Endy- 
 
 mion as sandalled for the chase. Not tall, 
 
 yet long-legged enough to give her advantage 
 
 i6 
 
on the road or the English downs, she had a 
 free grace of movement, untrammeled by the 
 awkwardness of fear. Even so early, she 
 was slightly deaf, and one of her prettiest 
 individual poses — ^yet how unstudied! — was, 
 standing, bent slightly forward like Atalanta 
 ready for the race, the rounded cup of her 
 palm behind her ear, beseeching almost 
 whimsically in the low voice that was half 
 whisper without its sibilance : "Please !" 
 Her misfortune was not a blemish ; she made 
 it a grace. Over that and the drawback of 
 eyes ineffectual without the help of glasses 
 she never wasted a breath of impatience : she 
 adopted instead a humorous acceptance of 
 these latter extraneous servitors as personi- 
 fied faculties of her own. The act of vision 
 she ascribed to her spectacles alone, and 
 took a never diminished joy in reminding 
 you how Thackeray did it before her. 
 
 "If one dastard of a misplaced comma has 
 escaped me," she writes, of printers' proofs 
 corrected to the last degree of accuracy, 
 "these spectacles fail to find it." 
 
 Upon one victorious error, chased down 
 17 
 
and down and still cropping up in the last 
 proof, she declares : 
 
 "Tragedy! how could it have come about? 
 I'd give my spectacles to know." 
 
 Probably nobody so unspoiled and humble 
 in willingness to share the common lot, or 
 with less respect for the subterfuge called 
 temperament, ever had less practical ac- 
 quaintance with the domestic functions exalt- 
 ed into dull shibboleths, or was more irrecon- 
 cilably estranged from the art of the modiste 
 and the rites whereby the incomprehensible 
 gods of "style" are commonly propitiated. 
 If you could boil an egg acceptably and en- 
 liven it with an agreeable quota of salt and 
 pepper, she would have made you cordon bleu 
 on the spot. That the sleeve of a garment 
 could be removed by the simple adjunct of a 
 pair of scissors and replaced again with a 
 symmetry more conformable to the arm, was 
 a mystery before which she frankly quailed, 
 and any force of self-confidence she might 
 have brought to bear went down like nine- 
 pins. Running rivers of verse, pinnacles of 
 i8 
 
dates, names, cosmogonies of thrones, princi- 
 palities and powers, found room in that ex- 
 quisitely ordered world which was her brain : 
 yet you could throw her into a cold sweat of 
 apprehension by confronting her with some 
 homely task or implement as familiar to the 
 Marthas of civil life as the use of fork and 
 spoon. And this was no affectation of sensi- 
 tiveness to crumpled rose leaves, no arro- 
 gance of privilege. She had an appetite as 
 responsive to good things as if their 
 chemistry had not been as dark to her as that 
 of lost elixirs, and for some inconspicuous 
 ribbon of her dress she would cherish an af- 
 fection almost poignant in its childlike in- 
 tensity. She was herself alternately petrified 
 and convulsed by accumulating instances of 
 her unfitness for the monstrous requisitions 
 of a concrete world. Returning again and 
 again to the assault, she is uniformly worsted. 
 She sees, with an eye momentarily sharpened 
 to recognition, in a modest kitchen, the com- 
 monest adjuncts to dishwashing, and leaves 
 early that she may buy the duplicates of the 
 19 
 
magic implements and set them up before the 
 gods of home. And forthwith she writes, in 
 a rollicking delight : 
 
 "And behold I their like had been in this 
 house from of old, and I was subject to much 
 scorn." 
 
 Helpful kindness itself, she dashes into 
 town to buy a flannel wrapper for an exacting 
 old lady for whom she has a kindness and 
 who is sick and destitute, and next day ex- 
 plains, between helpless gusts, "those spec- 
 tacles" dashed with tears : 
 
 "And lo ! it should have been a female gar- 
 ment and I bought a male." 
 
 And these things are to be remembered of 
 her, not because the ox may take brute 
 pleasure in deploring the delicacy of his 
 brother, the race-horse, not only that they 
 made her an irresistibly fascinating blend of 
 power and helplessness, but because her 
 natural inability to deal with the drudgery 
 that smooths the way of life bore hard upon 
 her in those later years when she was like a 
 butterfly bound upon the wheel of this difficult 
 world. She was simply a creature of highly 
 20 
 
specialized aptitudes, and the eyes of her 
 mind, they that needed no fortifying lenses, 
 were set so steadily upon the brightness of an 
 inward achieving that they could never be 
 focused for the clear perception of a certain 
 type of immediate needs. To the inequali- 
 ties of the road of usage over which her 
 feet obediently traveled, she was blind, unless 
 indeed the road began to wave green 
 branches, and there were vistas of beauty, 
 and the birds sang. Then the human awoke 
 in her and also sang in untrammeled lusti- 
 hood and she was at once that earth spirit 
 who gathered iris and squandered and for- 
 got it, yet knew all such forgettings should 
 be hers in Paradise. But even then she was 
 the vagabond of the road as she conceived 
 it: a matter of smoothly running caravans 
 and magic camp fires, — not corners of ingen- 
 ious torment where one shaped garments and 
 boiled eggs. 
 
 And this antagonism was inevitable: for 
 the earth, as it is made, is forever hostile to 
 that other earth, immortal, invisible, where 
 alone the highly imaginative can live without 
 
 21 
 
nostalgia. If they have to fight the rude con- 
 ditions of the visible world, they do it pining 
 "for what is not." The imps of time and 
 place have an implacable enmity for the 
 angels of thought and pure imagination and 
 hinder them at every step. They devote 
 their mischievous activities to the clipping of 
 wings, especially of pinions tipped with rose 
 or gold. And the facts of the case are for- 
 ever on their side. Man must be fed. And 
 unless he has been born the darling of sheer 
 luck, he must set his hand to wresting from 
 the earth the bare right to live. The prod- 
 uct of Louise Guiney's genius was not, in any 
 large sense, marketable. The most fan- 
 tastically hopeful of partisans could not have 
 predicted for her work any valid recognition 
 whatever, save from the few who have them- 
 selves caught the gleam of Hesperidean fruit 
 and know by natal wisdom that this is no gold 
 to be minted into coin. Inevitably she was 
 among the 
 
 "delicate spirits pushed away 
 In the hot press of the noonday.'" 
 
 And she had the open palm. Money ran 
 
 22 
 
away from her like a rillet down a slope. She 
 would give beyond prudence and reason, and 
 gladly acquiesce in her own resultant leanness. 
 She demanded as little of that complexity of 
 cunningly ornamented indulgence which is 
 luxury as her own saints, and although she 
 could not, without a distress deadening to her 
 legitimate activities, fight with any efficacy 
 the battle of keeping the world a house of 
 ordered rooms, she made brave thrusts at it. 
 Appointed to the post-office at Auburndale, 
 and later to a position in the Boston Public 
 Library, she briskly clapped harness on her 
 horses of the sun and was anxiously intent on 
 doing well. But the only road for her was 
 still the path of escape to the open, to the free 
 fields of thought and the fellowship of the 
 written word. 
 
 Hers was a youth of picturesque loyalties, 
 one of them to the lost cause of the Stuarts, 
 a confessed congenital bias. The Irish 
 Jacobities, of whom there were many, had 
 "claimed the Stuarts as of the Milesian line, 
 fondly deducing them from Fergus." Born 
 into that direct succession of race Loyalty, she 
 23 
 
was in addition, (and this seems to be the true 
 argument) incalculably beguiled by the sheer 
 fascination of that luckless house. Her In- 
 quirendo into the Wit and Other Good Parts 
 of His Late Majesty King Charles the 
 Second ties you a pretty nosegay of the oak 
 twig and the white rose. How should she 
 not have loved Charles II., if only that he 
 was, in her own words, "a choice wag?" 
 "Charles might have confessed with Elia, 
 'How I like to be liked, and what don't I do 
 to be liked!'" Certainly His ill-starred 
 Majesty could have desired no liking more 
 whole-hearted, albeit discriminating, more 
 merrily tolerant than hers. He had cast his 
 magnetic spell upon her pen and it turned to 
 some good-natured vindicating of his varied 
 parts. Perhaps she never took her adher- 
 ence very seriously, off the printed page. 
 She was beguiled by picturesqueness, not so 
 much concerned with lineal rights; perhaps, 
 also, it tickled an impish fancy to repudiate 
 the "dull Georgian farce." But Charles 
 never had a more humorous apologist, one 
 24 
 
who gave him full value as an apostle of good 
 taste and of a "wheedling charm." 
 
 The sum of her appraisement is of a cap- 
 tivating genius who had found himself "in the 
 king business" and got addled and spoiled. 
 And who knows how she must have loved 
 him for his adaptability to portraiture of a 
 pen like hers, and for the rush and glow of 
 the Restoration, the very circumstances that 
 inspired her Hazlitt to his glorious inventory 
 of rustling silks and waving plumes, of gems 
 and people ! The time and the gay immor- 
 talities of it go to her head. 
 
 "There was an astonishing dearth of dull 
 people ; the bad and bright were in full blos- 
 som, and the good and stupid were pruned 
 away." 
 
 She adores "the sworded poets of the Civil 
 Wars, with their scarcely exerted aptitude for 
 the fine arts, whose names leave a sort of 
 star-dust along the pages of the anthol- 
 ogies." And it was, this star-dust of the 
 period, immediate to one of her own dreams, 
 a labor she delighted in: the making of a 
 25 
 
perfect anthology of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. 
 
 Her first book was Songs at the Start 
 (1884) and the first collected essays Goose- 
 Quill Papers (1885). The essays, despite a 
 wilful archaism, an armored stiffness of light 
 attack learned out of library shelves, are 
 astonishingly mature for a pen so young — if 
 by youth or age we mean the mere cumulative 
 sum of time passed. Indeed, the author 
 thought well enough of the scintillant little 
 papers to include two of them. An Open 
 Letter to the Moon, and On Teaching One's 
 Grandmother to Suck Eggs, in her later 
 Patrins. You have but to love Louise 
 Guiney to find Goose-Quill Papers a jovial 
 self-betraying little book to recur to when 
 you long for her whimsical face again or the 
 cascading gamut of her laugh. It is spiced 
 with playfulness, a learned playfulness, it 
 must be owned, and yet, if you know her, you 
 know also how much learning was waiting in 
 her teeming mind, eager to get into the book 
 and cram it, cover to cover, and you are 
 grateful for the sense of just values that let 
 26 
 
you off so gently. For she had one of those 
 fructifying minds which absorb like a sponge ; 
 everything they draw in breeds something 
 else, and the two, fact and mother wit, breed 
 again until you are swept along on a stream 
 of rushing lineage. And over her happy 
 selection of topics quaint and gay, her own 
 illuminating humor plays like a thread of 
 gold in tapestry moved lightly by a wind. We 
 may not, of course, actually assume, so ob- 
 jective is she even then, that her whimsies of 
 the first person are literally self-betraying; 
 but they do sometimes open a window upon 
 her as we know her, the gay relish of life that 
 was hers, the ardor for the great game of 
 chasing a happy fancy to its born destiny of 
 an ultimate end, and stroking it into the 
 gentle complaisance of the willing captive; 
 the healthy, untrammeled revolt against 
 bugaboos "nature itself cannot endure" — 
 notably mathematics when she "roars you" 
 like any lion (albeit smiling behind his 
 whiskers as begging to remind you he has no 
 idea of resorting to the argument of claws). 
 When she has mounted her gaily caparis- 
 27 
 
oned jennet of unforced humor, she takes the 
 world by inversion ; you shall follow her cir- 
 cumspectly, or her steed will throw up his 
 heels in your face and gallop off in the dust 
 of his own making. "My novitiate page," 
 she ruefully confesses, invoking the influence 
 of Hazlitt, "smelled hard of that dear name, 
 likewise of Browne, Taylor, and Cowley, 
 and Lamb, and of one R. L. S., a Romany 
 chal then utterly unknown, whom I had 
 found in secret and in secret worshiped." 
 It was a brave beginning, this slender book 
 of little essays, and it was dedicated to 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes. How charmingly, 
 with what engaging gallantry he must have 
 taken it! 
 
 To leap the fecund years to the Patrins of 
 her later youth is to follow the same whim- 
 sical and reflective vein. This book, deriv- 
 ing its fortunate title from patrin, "a Gypsy 
 trail : handfuls of leaves or grass cast by the 
 Gypsies on the road, to denote, to those be- 
 hind, the way which they have taken," is 
 primarily for him whom reading "maketh a 
 full man." The style, with a scholarship 
 28 
 
better tempered and easier to carry, being, as 
 it were, woven into chain mail, not the armor 
 of her earliest adventuring, is the despair of 
 the less agile and instructed mind. It is tinc- 
 tured with her personal quality, and is in- 
 credibly rich, the richer when you return to 
 it after absence and intercourse with more 
 immediate things, to find fruits of her com- 
 merce with far off civilisations and loving 
 sentience to the "hills of home." Like the 
 buyer in Goblin Market, she drips with juices 
 from the very fruits of life, antidote for our 
 dull ambitions: the years "wasted in prison 
 on casuist industries." It is full of a not too 
 quaint and bookish but an altogether de- 
 licious persiflage. She praises the scholar's 
 right to "fall back with delight upon a choice 
 assortment of ignorances." Yet, with what- 
 ever innocent suavity she puts it, you suspect 
 her of having few scholarly ignorances of her 
 own to fall back upon. So absolutely four- 
 square was her tower of recondite knowl- 
 edge that you imagine her as having some ado 
 to prevent ijs shadow from falling on the 
 reader less equipped and terrifying him into 
 29 
 
escaping her spell altogether. It is a book 
 of praise. Most of all does she advertise 
 the great narcotic of out-of-doors: the en- 
 chanting diversion of walking until the 
 rhythm of the first arduous stretch dulls into 
 the monotony of muscles settling into their 
 slowly apprehended task. She betrays an 
 unimpeachable bodily sanity. Though urban 
 by birth, she Is also, through adoptive kinship 
 of Pan and all the nymphs, a sylvan, to her 
 "a dear Elizabethan word." You may find 
 her beside the sea until conscious response to 
 It ebbs into that trance of wonder which is 
 the withdrawal of the soul into ultimate 
 chambers, the inviolable retreat whence it 
 comes forth washed clean of the injuries time 
 has dealt it. She sings a remorseful dirge 
 over the "defeated days" of captive animals. 
 She quickens her pace, at moments, to the 
 measures of a hilarious mind. Throughout 
 that mischievous "encourager of hesitancy," 
 the Harmless Scholar, she all but dances. 
 
 "The main business of the scholar," she 
 informs you, with a wicked twinkle behind 
 her spectacles, "is to live gracefully, without 
 30 
 
mental passion, and to get off alone into a 
 corner for an affectionate view of creation." 
 
 This she concedes you as an egg warranted 
 to hatch into something you don't expect, or 
 a bomb likely to burst harmlessly, if discon- 
 certingly, under your chair. For she knows, 
 by diabolic instinct, just what your idea of 
 the scholar is : the conserver of chronologies 
 and sapient conclusions fit chiefly to be waved 
 in pedagogical celebrations or trumpeted at 
 authors' readings. No such sterile destiny 
 as this for her, as she shall presently "fructify 
 unto you." 
 
 "Few can be trusted with an education." 
 This she tells you with a prodigious lightness 
 of self-assurance. "The true scholar's sign- 
 manual is not the midnight lamp on a folio. 
 He knows; he is baked through; all super- 
 fluous effort and energy are over for him. To 
 converse consumedly upon the weather, and 
 compare notes as to 'whether it is likely to 
 hold up tomorrow,' — this, says Hazlitt, 'is 
 the end and privilege of a life of study.' " 
 
 Mark you how humbly she proceeds, this 
 multi-millionaire of the mind. Her intellect- 
 
 31 
 
ual barns are bursting with fatness, her cattle 
 are on a thousand hills ; yet she spares you not 
 only the inventory of her acquisitions but any 
 hint of her respect for them. One is smilingly 
 glad to note that sometimes the challenge 
 of the world's intellectual penury is really too 
 much for her, and she cannot help rushing to 
 the rescue with armies of notable names and 
 historic data. Still she did converse con- 
 sumedly upon the weather also, and it Is one 
 of the happy incredibilities of her delightful 
 disposition that she never repudiated the in- 
 tercourse of honest minds, even if they were 
 dull. She adroitly refrained from tossing 
 them the ball she knew they could never re- 
 turn, though with a curve imperfectly trans- 
 cribed. She talked with them about dogs and 
 mushrooms — for there also she was sapient 
 in a lore that could be worn lightly and the 
 more easily concealed — and the merciful 
 recipe for killing a lobster painlessly before 
 you plunge him in the ensanguining pot, of 
 kittens and young furry donkeys and the uni- 
 versal boon of weather. And she had a store 
 of absurdities, never anecdotes in the dire 
 32 
 
sense of cut-and-dried obstructors of the 
 traffic between mortal minds, but odd quips 
 and spontaneous incongruities she was ready 
 to shower you withal. No less pretentious 
 scholar ever walked a world more suavely 
 aware of her gracious charm, more happily 
 oblivious of the breaches she could make in 
 worn conventions if she brought up her ar- 
 tillery. 
 
 The personal revelations in Patrins are un- 
 mistakable to those who knew her. She 
 writes On the Delights of an Incognito. Who 
 can fail to see L. I. G. herself in the person 
 of the hypothetical R., walking home after 
 "the day at a library desk" where he "had 
 grown hazy with no food and much 
 reading?" And passing the house where he 
 was always delightedly welcome and where 
 he loved to be, he looked in at the shining 
 dinner table where sat the family, unconscious 
 of him and yet — he knew it — only to be the 
 merrier if he dropped in, and "hurried on, 
 never quite so paradoxically happy in his life 
 as when he quitted that familiar pane without 
 rapping, and went back to the dark and the 
 33 
 
frost, unapprehended, impersonal, aberrant, 
 a spirit among men." For Louise Guiney, 
 prettily as she conformed herself to accepted 
 rules, was by nature a vagrom under conven- 
 tional roofs, a wandering breeze, an addict of 
 fern seed, a cloud, a rainbow fancy, whatever 
 could make itself, as speedily as might be, 
 impalpable to the eye and only a memory to 
 the too-inquisitive mind. As to the inner 
 philosophy of her, the cup of strength she 
 kept ever by her in intimate stillnesses, there 
 it stands in another essay. The Precept of 
 Peace. This bears much dwelling on, not 
 only by the mystic but the honest mind dis- 
 traught in the terrifying assaults of modern 
 life. How to serve the world while re- 
 nouncing it, how to possess your own soul, in 
 the peace that lets it grow and ripen seed! 
 She is in love, not with indifference, but the 
 brave behavior it endows you with. 
 
 "A very little non-adhesion to common 
 affairs," she tells you, "a little reserve of un- 
 concern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, pro- 
 vide the moral immunity which is the only 
 real estate." 
 
 34 
 
A benevolent receptiveness surrounds her. 
 She lets you interrupt her because you cannot 
 actually reach her inner strongholds; she is 
 at heart and head so engrossed in intimate 
 concerns so far from you that you cannot 
 possibly borrow or steal the key to burst in 
 and stumble about in them. Out of her gen- 
 eral kindliness she will deal gently with you, 
 hospitably even, that, being dulled and satis- 
 fied, you may go away the sooner and leave 
 her to the only aims worth, to her special 
 aptitudes, pursuing eagerly. This, it must 
 be remembered, was the gay bravado of 
 youth, with so much in its treasury it could 
 afford to squander time and a rain of friendli- 
 ness on even the invading bore. The day 
 came later when the world jostled her and 
 she had to double and turn to avoid it; but 
 always she cherished a philosophy of cour- 
 teous endurance. Personages nobly nurtured 
 learn early not to whimper. So, when Demos 
 finds a use for their heads, they die with a 
 grace seemingly reserved for kings and mar- 
 tyrs. And the use Demos finds for the heads 
 of the nobly born in the arts is to weary them 
 35 
 
with much crowning and to sap them with the 
 foolish requisition that they shall appear in 
 public arenas. But the great brotherhood 
 our L. I. G. subscribes to "hold the world but 
 as the world" and make no outcry over these 
 hindrances to a consecrated life. They do 
 not shy at uncouth contraptions on the road. 
 They have adopted the blinders of a mind 
 inwardly withdrawn, and — to o'erleap the 
 metaphor! — they smile in their daily dying. 
 This book, Patrins, smiles all through. It 
 informs you, chiefly by an innocently indirect 
 implication, that the phenomenon of being, 
 while it may be taken by schoolmen and 
 moralists for a balance between good and ill, 
 is a whimsical business, and the more you see 
 of it the more firmly you will determine to 
 view it aslant, with an eye to pleasing para- 
 dox. 
 
 As the tree of her mental life grew and 
 broadened into wider air, it cast a shade not 
 even her votaries were always zealous to 
 penetrate. She tended more and more to the 
 obscure, the far-off and dimly seen. In her 
 biographical work she was the champion of 
 36 
 
lost causes, the restorer of names dropped 
 out of rubricated calendars through sheer in- 
 attention of an unlearned world, or rusted by 
 time in chantries no longer visited. She 
 would sail, not for those known islands on 
 every map where harbors are charted and 
 the smallest craft can coal and water, but 
 for some lost Atlantis, even if she might only 
 moor in its guessed neighborhood and hear, 
 at least, the plash of ripples over it. She was 
 always listening, the generous hand to the re- 
 sponsive ear, to echoes from "forgotten or 
 infrequent lyres." 
 
 "Apollo," she says, "has a class of might- 
 have-beens whom he loves : poets bred in 
 melancholy places, under disabilities, with 
 thwarted growth and thinned voices; poets 
 compounded of everything magical and fair, 
 like an elixir which is the outcome of knowl- 
 edge and patience, and which wants, in the 
 end, even as common water would, the es- 
 sence of immortality." 
 
 It is not quite easy to tell why she delighted 
 so absolutely in digging for ore in spots of in- 
 credible difficulty. It was not that she was 
 37 
 
ill-grounded in the greater, more entirely ac- 
 cepted cults. Shakespeare was hers and Mil- 
 ton, and in Dante she did authoritative work. 
 And it is idle to wonder whether, so many 
 of the big critical jobs being done, she had 
 a keen eye to the market value of such un- 
 considered trifles as were left. The practi- 
 cal worth of a task would never have been an 
 incentive; it might have been a deterrent. 
 Like Mangan, there was that in her which 
 bade her not to cross the street to advance 
 her own interests; it persuaded her to what 
 seemed even wilful adoption of the losing 
 cause. (That she did, in many senses, har- 
 ness herself to drudgery, as life drove her the 
 more pitilessly to the wall, is the more to her 
 lasting renown; by nature she was single in 
 devotion to the tasks she loved and ready to 
 forswear the body's ease.) Nor was her at- 
 tachment to the imperfectly known by any 
 means the pleasure of the chase, the exhilara- 
 tion of the hunt when dates and genealogical 
 and critical sequences had "gone away" from 
 her hounds of scent and swiftness. It was 
 simply true that she had an inextinguishable 
 38 
 
love for the souls "ordained to fail." As it 
 made no difference to her whether a lasting 
 line of verse were hers or another's, so she 
 had the patience of the born annalist in pick- 
 ing up and conserving every least coin of the 
 realm of letters or of manly and romantic 
 deeds. 
 
 One of the floating bits of wreckage she 
 gave a hand to confirming in the illustrious 
 place given him by a few discerning minds, 
 was Mangan, the uniquely brilliant author of 
 an authoritative version of My Dark Rosa- 
 leen, a perverse and suffering soul, prey to a 
 blackness of mind and the Nemesis of his 
 own wandering will. There were "two 
 Mangans," she quotes from a previous 
 biographer, "one well known to the Muses, 
 the other to the police; one soared through 
 the empyrean and sought the stars, the other 
 lay too often in the gutters of Peter Street 
 and Bride Street." 
 
 He was a worshipper of that which is 
 
 above us, and prey to what is below, the 
 
 body's slave, the poor brain's mistaken 
 
 ministrant, striving alternately to fire it to 
 
 39 
 
new apprehensions and drug it with a despair 
 of its own possibilities. In this Study, James 
 Clarence Mangan, (1897) Louise Guiney 
 says: 
 
 "One can think of no other, in the long 
 disastrous annals of English literature, cursed 
 with so monotonous a misery, so much hope- 
 lessness and stagnant grief. He had no 
 public; he was poor, infirm, homeless, love- 
 less ; travel and adventure were cut off from 
 him, and he had no minor risks to run; the 
 cruel necessities of labor sapped his dreams 
 from a boy ; morbid fancies mastered him as 
 the rider masters his horse; the demon of 
 opium, then the demon of alcohol, pulled him 
 under, body and soul, despite a persistent and 
 heart-breaking struggle, and he perished 
 ignobly in his prime." 
 
 Could a combination of evils have been 
 imagined more poignantly appealing to this 
 young champion of shipwrecked souls? My 
 Dark Rosaleen alone was enough to enlist her 
 generous pen. As Mangan himself rescued 
 it from the indifferent fame of an archaic 
 fragment, a norm of beauty, and clothed it 
 40 
 
with the flying draperies of a glorifying 
 fancy, so she unfolded its history and holds 
 it up to new appreciation in a world not 
 given to dwell upon the historically obscure. 
 Mangan, she tells us, "was a pattern of sweet 
 gratitude and deference, and left his art to 
 prosper or perish as heaven should please." 
 How this moved her as an appeal she under- 
 stood! for she also was of those who sow 
 their seed in the wild garden of the world's 
 indifference and pass on, meekly unaware of 
 any right of mankind, born to heavenly 
 destinies, to stay and gather. He was dear 
 to her. She treated him tenderly, yet his 
 strange humors moved her to a smile. He 
 was "so ludicrous and so endeared a figure 
 that one wishes him but a thought in Field- 
 ing's brain, lovingly handled in three volumes 
 octavo and abstracted from the hard vicissi- 
 tudes of mortality." 
 
 This Study of hers reflects, with an especial 
 clarity, the form and color of her own critical 
 genius. In the comparison of masterpieces 
 and the measurement of values by accepted 
 standards, she was at ease in a large activity. 
 41 
 
If we would understand her method, we may 
 look on it here. The shallow conception of 
 the critic's task, as an expression of personal 
 preference, was not even germane to the rich- 
 ness of preparation she brought to even the 
 most inconsiderable reviewing. Here are no 
 snap judgments, ingenuous betrayal of tem- 
 peramental likings. The genesis of criticism 
 is the tool in her hands. Lead her to the 
 slenderest rill of poetry and, out of her witch- 
 hazel magic, she locates the spring that fed 
 it. She bows before "the few whose senses 
 are quick at literary divination." In this 
 Study learning ran, not wild, but at a splendid 
 even pace over the road of past achievement, 
 saluting guideposts by the way. Literary 
 resemblances, the least intentional, are rarest 
 joys to her. She is enchanted to find some of 
 Mangan's lighter verse rattling on like a Gil- 
 bertian libretto. 
 
 "Behold the exhumed precursor of The 
 Mikado 1" 
 
 Nothing rewards her more indubitably 
 than the discovery of even a quasi-lineage, a 
 shadow of likeness not to be developed into 
 42 
 
the actual relationship supported by time and 
 place. She does not often floor you with un- 
 impeachability of dates, but she knows the 
 very complexion of her time, "his form and 
 color." She remembers what wings beat the 
 air of fortunate decades, dropping pinions 
 more than one imitator snatched in falling 
 and wore brazenly in his cap. She can re- 
 hearse the unbroken descent of metres. Her 
 parallel between Mangan and Poe, their 
 dependence on the haunting adjunct of the 
 refrain, does revolve about chronology; but 
 chiefly she relies upon the convictions of her 
 divining mind. She compares the "neck and 
 neck achievements of Mangan and Poe." 
 She traces both back to the colossus Cole- 
 ridge, with his wells of color. His was the 
 spring of youth, and they bore away full 
 flagons. It is hardly possible to overrate 
 her value to the student of literature in these 
 learned but uncharted flights all over the 
 visible sky of the periods where her subjects 
 moved. Literature, she knows, is a species 
 of royal descent. The Titans may not live 
 to see the faces of their own children, yet out 
 
 43 
 
of those rich fecundities of authentic utter- 
 ance children are born and show trace of 
 august lineage. And it is hers, the "abstract 
 and brief chronicler" of values, to find it. 
 
 To Louise Guiney, there were two tran- 
 scending realities : poetry and what men call, 
 with varying accent, religion. She believed 
 in poetry as, in the old sense, an ecstasy. She 
 loved archaic phrases and grieved because fit 
 words should perish, mourning them as men 
 would^mourn if, believing there were children 
 of immortal lineage among them, they dis- 
 covered these could die. To her there were 
 archetypes of beauty, the living heavenly sub- 
 stance we have, with an unshaken prescience, 
 learned to call undying. Wandering evan- 
 escences, we persuade them down to us or 
 snatch at them and cage them in our heavier 
 atmosphere with the hope, sometimes be- 
 wilderingly justified, of their singing on and 
 on. One condition of our even hearing the 
 beat of those wings bending their swallow 
 flight to the responsive mind, is the high vi- 
 bration in ourselves, the intense activity of 
 what we call imagination. And this vibra- 
 44 
 
tion is so often the effervescence of youth, the 
 overplus of a richness of physical life — the 
 speed of the blood, a quick sensibility of the 
 brain — that after the pulse slows and the 
 brain responds less eagerly the poet sings no 
 more; or he clouds his verse with moralities 
 and loads it with the stiff embroidery of in- 
 tellectual conceits. Louise Guiney's singing 
 life was not long, because, after the impulse, 
 in its first capricious spontaneity, had left her, 
 she did not urge it back again. It would 
 have been impossible for her, at any period, 
 to select desirable subjects for poetry as the 
 landscape painter marks a lovely spot in his 
 mind's eye, to return with tubes and brush. 
 Once she did own to the tempting exercise of 
 composing a poem in cold blood. It turned 
 out to be compact of beauties appealing to the 
 public mind, and she viewed it thenceforth 
 from a hurt and wistful wonder. You might 
 say she cherished a distaste for it, as being a 
 child of indirect lineage, a mood disloyal to 
 the greater gods. She was ever the acolyte 
 in that temple, never beseeching at the altar, 
 but serving it. For she was of those pilgrims 
 45 
 
of destiny who are perpetually referring this 
 world to the pattern of worlds existing before 
 time began. To her, poetry is an unspoken 
 allegiance to the very essence of mysticism, 
 magic, glamourie. It is the echo from far 
 hills of space. It is never without the witch- 
 ery of the unknown, the guessed-at, the 
 adored but never seen. Not all its dances 
 are woven under the sky we scan chiefly for 
 the weather, but in the elusive gleaming 
 where not we but our dreams are denizens. 
 It is perpetually looking from "magic case- 
 ments." It brings the twilight feeling. It 
 may not be melancholy, yet it inspires melan- 
 choly. It may not be joyous, yet the pleasure 
 it awakens is more exquisite than it has words 
 to celebrate. These are matters far from 
 the market where we buy and sell and meas- 
 ure our worth by cleverness in exploiting it. 
 These are courts where our poet's "shy 
 foot" dared penetrate with the confidence of 
 a daughter of the house. 
 
 From Songs at the Start to Happy Ending 
 (1909) this last bearing her stamp as com- 
 prising "the less faulty half of all the author's 
 46 
 
published verse," her work hardly varies in 
 a certain cool, limpid, sometimes austere con- 
 tent. Songs at the Start is distinctly unlike 
 the familiar books of perfervid and unbridled 
 youth. Almost childlike, in some instances, 
 the songs are always restrained within due 
 measure. The gusts of a too tempestuous 
 heart, the revolt of youth against a world 
 ready made for it, are not hers. She might 
 be the child of a pagan ardency of simple joy, 
 singing to the echo in some waking spring. 
 These are the dewy recognitions of a world 
 "not realized." The faults she showed in 
 this first printing are the ones that plagued 
 her throughout, though she recognized them 
 with a rueful self-dispraise and mock extrava- 
 gance of remorse. They are the infrequent 
 lapses of a not invariably musical ear. To 
 the end, she would, from stanza to stanza, 
 unconsciously change her cadence. It might 
 be a fault for her to redress ; but who among 
 her lovers would complain of it now ? It was 
 an individual flaw, the little human imperfec- 
 tion like a mole on beauty's cheek; the too 
 studied reverse of it might have been some- 
 47 
 
thing not only "icily regular" but "splendidly 
 null." 
 
 The White Sail, part legend and part lyric, 
 with an academic ballast of sonnets, sang out 
 in fuller tone, though with no less individual 
 a measure. The legends ring curiously 
 scholastic in these days when the industrious 
 versifier celebrates the small beer of his own 
 "home town" in untrained eccentricities all 
 too faithful to his villageous mood. Her 
 legends were the tall pines of the fairy grove 
 she wandered in. There were pillared aisles 
 and porticos, not New England dooryards, 
 tapestries shaken by winds of the past, not 
 leaves, red and gold, blown her from the 
 swamps and hills she knew. Yet her bookish 
 fetters were straining from within, and in 
 Daybreak she sings out with a more indi- 
 vidual note, a faint far music, as if some 
 young chorister dared part the antiphonal 
 ranks of ordered service and try the song he 
 heard that morning when he and the lark 
 together saluted the hills of dawn. 
 
 "The young sun rides the mists anew; his cohorts 
 follow from the sea. 
 
 48 
 
Let Aztec children shout and sue, the Persian lend 
 a thankful knee: 
 
 Those glad Auroral eyes shall beam not any- 
 where henceforth on me. 
 
 "Up with the banners on the height, set every 
 
 matin bell astir! 
 The tree-top choirs carouse in light; the dew's. 
 
 on phlox and lavender: 
 Ah, mockery! for, worlds away, the heart of 
 
 morning beats with her." 
 
 This she did not reclaim for the authorized 
 last printing, and none can say whether she 
 would let us snatch it out of its young ob- 
 scurity. But it is so unmistakably one of the 
 first trial flights of the pure lyric in her, it 
 sings so melodiously, that the mere chron- 
 ology of her work demands it. In the same 
 book beats the haunting refrain : 
 
 "Youth is slipping, dripping, pearl on pearl, away." 
 
 And as you are about to close the door on 
 this virginal chamber of April airs and cloist- 
 ral moonlight, of ordered books breathing 
 not leather only but the scent of "daffodilean 
 days," your heart rises up, for here is The 
 Wild Ride, a poem which first beat out its 
 galloping measure in a dream, and continued, 
 with the consent of her own critical mind, to 
 49 
 
the last book of all. The beginning and the 
 end are like nothing so much as the call of 
 youth and the answer of undaunted age. It 
 was, one may guess, her earliest lyric run- 
 away, the first time she lost herself in the 
 galloping rush of a stanza's trampling feet. 
 
 "I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses 
 All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses. 
 All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing 
 and neighing. 
 
 "Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to 
 
 the saddle 
 Weather-worn and abreast, go men of our galloping 
 
 legion, 
 With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that 
 
 loves him. 
 
 "The trail is through dolour and dread, over crags 
 
 and morasses ; 
 There are shapes by the way, there are things that 
 
 appal or entice us: 
 What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we 
 
 are vowed to the riding. 
 
 "Thought's self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a 
 
 cobweb. 
 And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a 
 
 sunbeam: 
 Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our 
 
 pursuing. 
 
 "A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle, 
 A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty : 
 
 50 
 
We hurry with never a word in the track of our 
 fathers. 
 
 " ( I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses 
 All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, 
 All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing 
 and neighing.) 
 
 "We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the 
 storm-wind ; 
 
 We leap to the infinite dark, like sparks from the 
 anvil. 
 
 Thou leadest, O God ! All's well with Thy troop- 
 ers that follow." 
 
 In The Roadside Harp (1893) (and this 
 she calls, as late as 191 1, "my best book") 
 she is in full swing of that individual color 
 and form of verse that were hers thenceforth, 
 hall-marked, inimitable, of a delicate yet im- 
 perishable fragility of loveliness, unique as 
 the hand they were written in. Here sounds 
 her own true note. Here were more plainly 
 distinguishable the defined colors of the 
 braided strands of destiny that made her so 
 rare a nature and were perhaps — it is well to 
 put it softly, this question — to hinder her in 
 robustness and variety of performance. Irish 
 by birth, she had not to the full, what she 
 finds in Mangan, that "racial luxuriance and 
 
 51 
 
fluency." And, like him, her "genius is hap- 
 pier on Saxon than on Celtic ground." She 
 was too subject to varied impulses to be the 
 exponent of one. Her love in letters ran 
 passionately to the Anglo-Saxon; the seven- 
 teenth century was her home. She was de- 
 voutly Catholic, yet living fibres in her knew 
 the earth as it was in its unsymbolized fresh- 
 ness before the Great Deliverer came. 
 
 "You are a natural Christian," she wrote 
 once to a friend poor in the consolations of 
 belief, "with a birthright of gladness and 
 peace, whether you seize it or not; whereas 
 I am the other fellow, a bed-rock pagan, 
 never able to live up to the inestimable spirit- 
 ual conditions to which I was born." 
 
 This was humility only, no wavering from 
 her transcending faith. Yet the wholesome 
 natural man in her was acutely sensitive to 
 that earth which saw the immortal gods. You 
 find her listening, responsive, to the far heard 
 echoes of Greek harmony. She was ready 
 with her cock to iEsculapius, the tribute of 
 her gentle allegiance to those kingly pagans 
 who loved the light of the sun and shrank 
 52 
 
from the "dishonor of the grave," who knew 
 the face of Nemesis and were, above all, 
 disciples of the law of Aidos, the negation of 
 excess. In the rich exposition of Gilbert 
 Murray : 
 
 "Aidos implies that, from some subtle 
 emotion inside you, some ruth or shame or 
 reflection, some feeling perhaps of the com- 
 parative smallness of your own rights and 
 wrongs in the presence of the great things of 
 the world, the gods and men's souls and the 
 portals of life and death, from this emotion 
 and from no other cause, amid your ordinary 
 animal career of desire or anger or am- 
 bition, you do, every now and then, at certain 
 places, stop." 
 
 Now this, of course, concerns emotion, 
 conduct. But the same sense of just limit 
 concerns also art. Your emotion must be 
 "recollected in tranquillity" lest it drag the 
 hysteric Muse into frenzied measures. We 
 must — stop. Louise Guiney knew this 
 through a flawless Intuition, but she went pace 
 by pace with the Greeks while they counselled 
 her anew. It is not merely her choice of 
 53 
 
Attic subjects, like Simoisius, or the Alexan- 
 driana that are, we are told, so faithful in 
 spirit, though she had no Greek. It is that 
 in this book we are renewedly conscious of 
 the oneness of mortal longing and earth 
 loveliness, so tightly are they entwined. Here 
 is a sentience to the throes of that earth which 
 is not solely the earth set to man's uses, but 
 mysteriously made and mysteriously con- 
 tinued, with its uncomprehended language of 
 light and dark and its ebb and flux eternally 
 in sway. Christian in belief, she was pagan 
 in her listening nerves. And her harp, hung 
 in the window opening on what we call 
 eternity, thrilled to many breezes. Being 
 Christian, she was, as in her life, all devotiori, 
 all pure obedience, rapt celebrant of the story 
 of the Birth and the Cross, a vowed Eremite 
 to the belief that counts all things loss, save 
 One. Hands of diverse angels reached out 
 of the sky and touched her harp to song or 
 Litany. There was the spirit of an assured 
 immortality. There was, too, the voice of 
 Erda, the Earth, crooning from the root 
 caverns in abysses of time past. The pagan 
 54 
 
heart of her, the heart that was still im- 
 movably centred in the gentle certainties of 
 Christ, is embedded in The Still of the Year. 
 She knows the earth, because she has entered 
 into the very spirit of created things and her 
 mortal part suffers the pang of awakening 
 which, to the earth, is spring. But what is it 
 to the soul ? 
 
 "Up from the willow-root 
 Subduing agonies leap; 
 The field-mouse and the purple moth 
 Turn over amid their sleep; 
 The icicled rocks aloft 
 Burn saffron and blue alway, 
 And trickling and tinkling 
 The snows of the drift decay. 
 Oh, mine is the head must hang 
 And share the immortal pang! 
 Winter or spring is fair; 
 Thaw's hard to bear. 
 Heigho! my heart's sick." 
 
 Some of the verse from this middle period 
 is so fragile and austerely tremulous, like bare 
 boughs moved by a not unkindly wind, that 
 you are aware of what has, in another sense, 
 been called "scantness." Not only does she 
 adventure delicately in her shallop, she is fain 
 of archaic brevity and pauses that do unques- 
 
 55 
 
tionably halt the accompanying voyager, to 
 his discomfiture. A Ballad of Kenelm was 
 such as they chanted "on a May morning" in 
 other days than ours. It has the consonance 
 of prose trembling into verse. We are too 
 luxurious for it. We want to be borne along 
 on a lilting wave, we who have not found it 
 possible to accommodate ourselves to the peg- 
 leg-to-market of free verse (what our poet 
 herself once called, in a mischievous snap- 
 shot of judgment, "the rag-tag of vers 
 libres"). Even the loving apostrophe to 
 Izaak Walton is more chant than song, 
 justified rather by the spirit than the form. 
 One who knew her unceasing pains with 
 verse and prose, how a stanza could never 
 count itself finished beyond possibility of 
 being smashed into unrecognizable fragments 
 and remade, remembers this as an instance 
 of her ruthlessness to her children even after 
 they had grown up and gone their ways into 
 the ultimate stronghold of the printed page. 
 Here the opening lines run : 
 
 "What trout shall coax the rod of yore 
 In Itchen stream to dip?" 
 
 S6 
 
Months after printing, the incorrigible 
 dissonance of the two opening words struck 
 her and, having no smallest modicum of pro- 
 fessional vanity, she must needs admit a 
 friend immediate to her to the excellent fool- 
 ing of the discovery, and went about shout- 
 ing, between gusts of mirth: "What trout! 
 what trout I" 
 
 The harsher the discord she could lend the 
 
 unfortunate twain, the more gustily she 
 
 laughed, and in Happy Ending the choppy 
 
 sea subsided into unimpeachable cadence : 
 
 "Can trout allure the rod of yore 
 In Itchen stream to dip?" 
 
 But in The Roadside Harp, though her 
 metres were sometimes inhospitable to the 
 ear unprepared, she did attain the topmost 
 reaches of the hills of words' delight. The 
 Two Irish Peasant Songs ran with a light 
 step, and a breath as sweet as the whispers 
 over Ireland's harp. Here also is an imper- 
 ishable beauty of a lyric, fit for some ecstatic 
 anthology, so rare in form and color that the 
 listening ear scarce cares for the meaning, so 
 its music may go on and on. 
 57 
 
"When on the marge of evening the last blue light 
 
 is broken, 
 And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from 
 
 afar, 
 Or when my lattice opens, before the lark hath 
 
 spoken, 
 On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning's dying 
 
 star, 
 
 "I think of thee, (O mine the more if other eyes 
 
 be sleeping!) 
 Whose great and noonday splendors the many 
 
 share and see, 
 While sacred and forever, some perfect law is 
 
 keeping 
 The late, the early tvnlight, alone and sweet for 
 
 me." 
 
 What is the piper piping when the thin 
 sweet sound comes down the valley like water 
 dripping from stair to rocky stair, or "petals 
 from blown roses on the grass"? You do 
 not need to guess. You know it is in abso- 
 lute accord with the night breeze and the 
 long shadows and the hylas fluting in the 
 year. It is music only, and all your heart 
 answers is : 
 
 "Piper, pipe that song again." 
 
 Here, too, is that poignant lament. To a 
 Dog's Memory. 
 
 58 
 
"The gusty morns are here, 
 When all the reeds ride low with level spear ; 
 And on such nights as lured us far of yore, 
 Down rocky alleys yet, and through the pine, 
 The Hound-star and the pagan Hunter shine; 
 But I and thou, ah, field-fellow of mine, 
 Together roam no more." 
 
 All Matthew Arnold's musical place names 
 In Thyrsis and The Scholar Gypsy: the 
 "Ilsley Downs", "the track by Childsworth 
 Farm", "the Cumner range", "the stripling 
 Thames at Bablock Hythe" — these are emu- 
 lated In a not inferior accent in the sombre 
 music of this threnody. Almost, remember- 
 ing the flowers in Lycidas, you long to strew 
 them on her darling's grave. 
 
 "There is a music fills 
 The oaks of Belmont and the Wayland hills 
 Southward to Dewing's little bubbly stream, — 
 The heavenly weather's call ! Oh, who alive 
 Hastes not to start, delays not to arrive. 
 Having free feet that never felt a gyve 
 Weigh, even in a dream?" 
 
 For those who knew her this poem carries 
 
 a footnote of poignant history. She was in 
 
 London when letters came from home, and 
 
 were opened in a quaint restaurant, the Apple 
 
 59 
 
Tree Inn, a vegetarian resort where three 
 merry souls were met to be glad over lentils 
 and strange innocences of diet cunningly 
 spiced to resemble the ensanguined viands 
 repudiated and abhorred. She opened her 
 letter and read, and her young — always 
 young and childlike — face trembled into an 
 unbelieving grief. She could not speak. The 
 day was dead for her and those for whom 
 she would have made the constant spark in 
 it and afterward the memory. On the heels 
 of the ill tidings she went with one friend 
 to whom she could not tell the news, but 
 whom she asked not to leave her, to Hamp- 
 stead Heath, and the two sat all the after- 
 noon in silence on a secluded slope, their feet 
 in English green and her eyes unseeingly on 
 the sky. Her dog was dead. 
 
 There are those for whom the conduct 
 of life, either a passion or a malaise, accord- 
 ing to individual temperament, transcends 
 even the magic of pure fancy. For them 
 there are trumpet calls in this book, perhaps 
 the most widely known and praised, The 
 60 
 
Kings, its last stanza the battle-cry of the 
 faint yet brave : 
 
 "To fear not possible failure, 
 Nor covet the game at all, 
 But fighting, fighting, fighting. 
 Die, driven against the wall." 
 
 This is metal for sounding clarions. And 
 so too is The Knight Errant: the second 
 stanza an epitome of grand quotable abstrac- 
 tions : 
 
 "Let claws of lightning clutch me 
 From summer's groaning cloud. 
 Or ever malice touch me. 
 And glory make me proud. 
 Oh, give my youth, my faith, my sword, 
 Choice of the heart's desire: 
 A short life in the saddle. Lord! 
 Not long life by the fire." 
 
 You find admonishing whispers from a 
 mind grown expert in counsel : 
 
 "Take Temperance to thy breast. 
 While yet is the hour of choosing, 
 As arbitress exquisite 
 Of all that shall thee betide ; 
 For better than fortune's best 
 Is mastery in the using, 
 And sweeter than anything sweet 
 The art to lay it aside." 
 
 6i 
 
Here is the reflective, the scholastic, pene- 
 trating the hall of song and hushing more 
 abounding measures to its own consecrating 
 uses. She was in love, not with death as it 
 was the poetic fashion to be in a past era of 
 creative minds, but with gentle withdrawals, 
 fine appreciations of ultimate values, cloistral 
 consecrations. Her steady hand on the reins 
 of her horses of the sun, they took the 
 heavenly track of world-old orbits, not gal- 
 loping at will, now high, now low, from sun- 
 rise to the evening star. And this not be- 
 cause she feared, like Icarus, to fall, but that 
 she was perpetually referring beauty to its 
 archetype; she had, to paraphrase her own 
 words, "eternity in mind." 
 
 "Waiting on Him who knows us and our need, 
 Most need have we to dare not, nor desire, 
 But as He giveth, softly to suspire 
 Against his gift with no inglorious greed, 
 For this is joy, though still our joys recede." 
 
 If she had been more rather than less in 
 love with life, not as a trinket she could re- 
 linquish with no ado, but a mysterious ardor 
 it was anguish to dream of losing, if she 
 could have besought her Lord, in moments 
 62 
 
of a child's resistless longing, to give even 
 the gifts that are not solely to His glory, her 
 song might have a fuller sweep, a wilder 
 melody. Out of earthly hungers the music 
 of earth is made. As she grew in spiritual 
 aspiration, her verse attuned itself more and 
 more to the echoes of a harmony heavenly if 
 austere. Some of these devout lyrics are so 
 individual her very personality flashes out 
 before you, and you hear her own lips chant- 
 ing her own song. She is the figure in the 
 stained glass window, saint or warrior, 
 dimming the outer light to woo the eye to 
 the ecclesiastical richness of the surrounding 
 red and gold. Or she is a young knight 
 riding at twilight to service in the chantry 
 you have never sought, and you look up from 
 your table spread with meat and wines and 
 watch him in bewilderment of spirit ; and the 
 figures on the arras tremble, as it might be 
 from the wind of his passing. And having 
 once seen the erect slender body riding to 
 his passion of prayer, you turn to the moving 
 figures of the arras with new eyes, wondering 
 if, begot of earthly looms, they are as beauti- 
 63 
 
ful as you had thought. Here is no passion 
 
 but the unfed passion of the soul, the life 
 
 sustained not through plethora but lack, the 
 
 everlasting verity of renunciation which is the 
 
 pale reflex of the face of Christ. Her later 
 
 work, the greater part of it, is again like 
 
 the trembling of bare exquisite branches 
 
 against a sunset sky, the sky of a gold and 
 
 green limpidity a world away from roseate 
 
 dawns. She was like a spirit withdrawn from 
 
 a turmoil she would neither recognize nor 
 
 enter, sitting in her tower above the world, 
 
 spinning flowers out of frost. 
 
 The Martyr's Idyl (1899) she wrote with 
 
 a fervor of devotional conviction, and in the 
 
 same volume, a fringe upon the hem of its 
 
 brocaded stateliness, is An Outdoor Litany, 
 
 a cry full of earth's blood and tears, and 
 
 more immediate to earth's children who also 
 
 suffer than the high counsels of the abstinent : 
 
 "The spur is red upon the briar, 
 The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore; 
 The wind shakes out the colored fire 
 From lamps a-row on the sycamore ; 
 The bluebird, with his flitting note. 
 Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat ; 
 The mink is busy; herds again 
 
 64 
 
Go hillward in the honeyed rain ; 
 The midges meet. I cry to Thee 
 Whose heart 
 
 Remembers each of these : Thou art 
 My God who hast forgotten me!" 
 
 Here are beauties dear to the mortal mind 
 to which an anguish of discontent is compre- 
 hensible because "it is common." Here is 
 the sum and circle of nature, tagged with the 
 everlasting paradox : the mindlessness and in- 
 difference of the beauty wherewith we are 
 surrounded and our hunger to which it will 
 not, because it cannot, minister. This is 
 great writing: for here the soul walks un- 
 abashed, articulate, impassioned, the finite 
 crying to the infinite, the perishing atom ap- 
 pealing to the sky of the universal over him. 
 Perhaps there can be nothing greater in a 
 dramatic sense, in our prison-house under the 
 encircling sky, than the accusatory or chal- 
 lenging voice of the creature, through the 
 unanswering framework of his mortal 
 destiny, to the God Who created both him 
 and it. Lear, in the storm that was unmind- 
 ful of him, set his breath against its blast. 
 When the cry breaks into hysteria, then the 
 65 
 
man is mad. The merciful reaction that lies 
 
 in nature's anodynes sets in to counteract and 
 
 dull. But our poet, though she can write : 
 
 "Help me endure the Pit, until 
 Thou wilt not have forgotten me," 
 
 never challenges her God with mad interro- 
 gation. It is not His justice she assails ; she 
 but beseeches the quickening of His will to 
 save. There is an immeasurable distance be- 
 tween entire overthrow and the sanity of the 
 creature who, though sorely wounded, has 
 lost no jot of faith in divine medicaments. 
 Her plea is only that she may share the 
 wholesome life of His birds and trees. 
 
 "As to a weed, to me but give 
 Thy sap!" 
 
 The poem may have been written in the 
 period she calls "my calendar of imprison- 
 ments," perhaps in the two years given over 
 to "nerves." This includes the eight years 
 from 1894, when she entered the Auburn- 
 dale post-office, through 1902. They were 
 weighted with the routine work she des- 
 perately essayed at post-office and library. 
 The summer of 1895, given to a walking 
 66 
 
trip in England, she illuminates by a 
 rapt "annus beatus," and two years were 
 eaten into by the illness and death of 
 the aunt she dearly loved, "the only being," 
 she writes, "who was all mine from my 
 birth." It was a cruelly large gulp for the 
 dragon of time to make at the precious 
 substance of her later youth. There was 
 some fugitive versifying, but little of the 
 steady routine of pen and book to make her 
 life as she loved it. Some of her most signifi- 
 cant verse did come in here, bright splashes 
 of sunset red on the flat marsh lands of her 
 way. Especially in the annus beatus there 
 was exquisite writing and some immediately 
 after in that surge of remembered passion 
 risen over and over again in those who love 
 England and have said good-bye to her, only 
 to return in homesick thought. Of this period 
 Arboricide stands alone and stately, like the 
 tree of her lament. 
 
 "A word of grief to me erewhile: 
 We have cut the oak down, in our isle. 
 
 "And I said: 'Ye have bereaven 
 The song-thmsh and the bee, 
 
 67 
 
And the fisher-boy at sea 
 Of his sea-mark in the even ; 
 And gourds of cooling shade, to lie 
 Within the sickle's sound; 
 And the old sheep-dog's loyal eye 
 Of sleep on duty's ground ; 
 And poets of their tent 
 And quiet tenement. 
 Ah, impious! who so paid 
 Such fatherhood, and made 
 Of murmurous immortality a cargo and a 
 trade.' 
 
 "For the hewn oak, a century fair, 
 A wound in earth, an ache in air." 
 
 But the actual crown of the book Is in the 
 two stanzas called Borderlands. Within the 
 small circle of recurrent rhythm this poem 
 holds the ineffable. It is a softly drawn and 
 haunting melody on the night wind of our 
 thoughts, it hints at the nameless ecstasies 
 that may be of the rhythm of the body or 
 the soul — but we know not! — it is of the 
 texture of the veil between sense and the un- 
 apprehended spirit. 
 
 "Through all the evening. 
 All the virginal long evening, 
 Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread 
 
 to walk alone ; 
 For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is 
 ever-during ; 
 
 68 
 
And who would suffer again beneath a too 
 
 divine alluring, 
 Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces 
 
 blown ? 
 
 "Yet in the valley, 
 At a turn of the orchard alley. 
 When a wild aroma touched me in the moist 
 
 and moveless air, 
 Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy 
 
 vesture round Thee, 
 Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had 
 
 nearly found Thee, 
 O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired ! O first and 
 
 final Fair!" 
 
 The line : 
 
 "Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces 
 blown," 
 
 Is one of those pervasive beauties which, 
 though in a perfect simplicity, invoke 
 the universal that is beauty's self. You 
 see in it — or you fancy, for it falls on the sen- 
 sitive plate of emotion that far outranks your 
 intellect — all the faces of all the dead from 
 the shepherd slain outside Eden past the 
 Pharaohs and queens that "died young and 
 fair" to him "that died o' Wednesday." 
 
 Happy Ending is her renewed hail and 
 her farewell. Here are some of the old 
 69 
 
beauties and, gathered up with them, the later 
 buds of a more sparsely blossoming fancy, 
 snowed under time and yesterday. It is a sad 
 book, for all its nobility; it breathes the ac- 
 cent of farewells. To a friend who chal- 
 lenged the appositeness of the title she said, 
 smiling, it was, on the contrary, exact, for 
 her life of verse was done. In 19 17, she 
 wrote : 
 
 "The Muse, base baggage that she is, fled 
 long ago. (I knew what I was up to when I 
 called it Happy Ending.)" 
 
 The additions of this later period are 
 slightly more involved, much more austere. 
 The world does not call to her now in the 
 manifold voices of that vernal time when 
 she and her dog went field-faring. It is a 
 spot, though still dearly loved, to leave. In 
 Beati Mortui she celebrates the "dead in 
 spirit" who, having renounced the trappings 
 of a delusive day, are henceforth like angel 
 visitants in a world where they hold no foot 
 of vain desire. The sonnet "Astrjea," her 
 actual farewell, has the poignant sestette : 
 70 
 
"Are ye unwise who would not let me love 
 you? 
 Or must too bold desires be quieted ? 
 Only to ease you, never to reprove you, 
 I will go back to heaven with heart unfed : 
 Yet sisterly I turn, I bend above you, 
 To kiss (ah, with what sorrow!) all my dead." 
 
 Next to the Golden City of belief she had, 
 as she began, continued to love poetry, the 
 making of it, the "love of lovely words." 
 And though an initiate world had hailed her, 
 when, like a young shepherd wandered into 
 town, a bewildering "strayed reveller," she 
 came "singing along the way," man had been 
 finding out many inventions and kept no ear 
 for strains out of Arcady or long notes 
 prophetically echoed from the New Jerusa- 
 lem. He was laying the foundations of a 
 taste which was to flower in jazz and the 
 movies and the whirling of wheels on great 
 white ways. She had her own small public 
 always. To these, her books were cool 
 colonnades with the sea at the end. But she 
 had learned, now with no shadow of doubt, 
 that there would never be any wider response 
 from the world of the printed word. She 
 71 
 
was not, in the modern sense, "magazinable." 
 Editors were not laying up treasure in the 
 safety deposits of the immortalities; they 
 were nursing their subscription lists. If she 
 had kept on singing, it would have been into 
 that silence whence the poet's voice echoes 
 back to him with a loneliness terrifying to 
 hear. Need that dull his fancy and mute his 
 tongue ? Not in youth, perhaps. When the 
 blood flows boundingly, you write your verses 
 on green leaves, so they are written, and if 
 nobody wants the woven chaplet of them, you 
 laugh and cast it on the stream. Through 
 the middle years it is different. You must 
 be quickened by an unquenchable self-belief 
 or warmed at the fire of men's responsive 
 sympathy to write at all. There is some- 
 thing in the hurt an unheeding world can deal 
 you that, besides draining the wounded heart, 
 stiffens the brain and hand. And Atalanta's 
 pace may be slackened by the misadventures 
 of the way. Her sandal may come loose, or 
 she slips on a pebble and strains the tendon 
 of that flying foot. 
 
 For poetry is a matter of the mounting 
 72 
 
blood as well as the tempered mind. It has, 
 in spite of those who have suffered the hor- 
 rible disaster of physical overthrow and yet 
 have kept on singing, something intimately 
 dependent on the actual coursing of the 
 blood, the beat of the physical heart. The 
 only verse Louise Guiney prized, was the 
 verse with wings, spontaneous as the gestures 
 of childhood or the oriole's song. She could 
 knock her lines into a wild ruin and rebuild, 
 but that was after the first swift assembling 
 of stone on stone. Any idea of verse soberly 
 and slowly evolved, as an intellectual feat, 
 was afar from her. "Our best things," she 
 said, "are the easiest. They're no trouble." 
 They did cost, in the last sweet pangs of in- 
 tent consideration, of rearranging, polishing, 
 and hunting down the best and only word. 
 When the poetic impulse seized her, she bent 
 to it in obedient delight. She never coaxed 
 or beckoned. Only into the living spring did 
 she dip her cup: no thrifty piping it to the 
 house in forethought of the day when the 
 frost creeps and "no birds sing." The 
 greatest beauties in her verse were as spon- 
 73 
 
taneous as they dropped from the skies and 
 she set them in their chaste enduring gold. 
 Though she was so unwearied in polishing 
 and changing, in their general scope and 
 temper the poems came as from the hand of 
 God, and when her own hand fell too laxly 
 to receive them, they did not come. Her 
 resultant loneliness of mind she accepted with 
 a decorum due the gods who give and take 
 away again; you might almost have called it 
 unconcern. For she was not greedy of life : 
 only grateful for its temperate dole. She 
 might own, under anxious accusation, to hav- 
 ing "no luck, no leisure, no liberty," but that 
 was only for the intimates who inevitably 
 "knew." 
 
 "As to the Muse," (this in 1916) "she has 
 given me the go by. No matter: this dog 
 has most hugely enjoyed his day, which was 
 Stevenson's day, and Lionel Johnson's, and 
 Herbert Clarke's, and Philip Savage's." 
 
 Though the last years of her middle age 
 
 were the less robust, as to the intellectual life 
 
 she had no waning. Her mind was no less 
 
 keen nor, except in the sudden exhaustion of 
 
 74 
 
a tragic illness, were her activities dulled. 
 She died young. And though the heart that 
 is the bravado of sheer courage was never 
 allowed to fail her, the bodily heart did fail. 
 Those who had walked with her knew its 
 weakness, and that, a race-horse on the road, 
 she was speedily exhausted in a climb. One 
 day, lost on Exmoor, her walking mate, look- 
 ing back for her, would find the world empty 
 of her altogether. Knowing the sort of spirit 
 she was, it was easy to guess the Little People 
 had kidnapped her or an archangel hidden 
 her in the brightness of his wings while they 
 discoursed together on topics of the upper 
 sky. But the heather had simply closed over 
 her ; she had lain down to rest her tired heart. 
 And as the physical world, out of the strange 
 jealousy of its predestined enmities, is for- 
 ever fighting the spirit, so the feebler action 
 of a weakening heart might dull those swift 
 spontaneities that are man's answer to the 
 beauty of things — his protest to the earth 
 that cajoles and challenges the while it fulfils 
 its mysterious hostility and overthrows him 
 in the end. In her prose work of editing and 
 
 75 
 
reviewing, the blade was sharper as time 
 wore upon it and she grew more recondite in 
 knowledge and more desperately exact, 
 omitting no extreme of patient scrutiny. But 
 poetry was her youth, and youth was gone. 
 And youth is not a matter of years. It is 
 what the years have done to us. 
 
 If we may borrow a tag of appreciation 
 for her verse, we could hardly do better than 
 quote her resume of Hurrell Froude's, the 
 "clearness, simplicity, orderly thought and 
 noble severity" she found in him. 
 
 His poems "have a strong singleness 
 and sad transparency, the tone of them a little 
 chilly, yet almost Virgilian, and arrestingly 
 beautiful; . . . abstinent, concentrated, true." 
 
 Now primarily Froude's verse is not in the 
 least like Louise Guiney's. It is scarcely 
 more than the first note leading up the scale. 
 In the amazed apprehension of beauty, he is 
 leagues behind her. Yet the "almost Vir- 
 gilian" of her comment fits her to perfection. 
 And if she is not always "clear" she is, mar- 
 velously again, "a little chilly," with the chill 
 76 
 
of spring twilights when earth scents are in 
 the air, the lily-of-the- valley just bloomed out 
 of the cold, or the damp richness of the April 
 woods. 
 
 Two little volumes, Monsieur Henri, the 
 story of the Count of La Rochejaquelein 
 (1892) and A Little English Gallery (1894) 
 are of the essence of that exhaustive re- 
 search and fine rehabilitation which were the 
 fruit of her later years. The war of the 
 Vendee, with its religious appeal, its romance 
 of feudal catchwords, took irresistible hold 
 on her, and the young Count of La Rocheja- 
 quelein, blazoned in youthful ardor, shone as 
 the sun. In thus regilding a futile struggle she 
 strives, by discarding political minutiae, to 
 "romanticize such dry facts as we mean shall 
 live." "A background," she concludes, "may 
 be blurred for the sake of a single figure. I 
 tried, therefore, to paint a portrait, willing 
 to abide by the hard saying of Northcote : 
 'If a portrait have force, it will do for his- 
 tory.' " Nor could she have resisted him of 
 whom history says, as he mounted and rode 
 away to his feat of arms : 
 77 
 
"Then first came the eagle look into his 
 eyes which never left them after." 
 
 To Louise Guiney, born to the love of 
 good fighters, the eagle look of courage and 
 consecration was as thrilling as, to the soldier 
 himself, the call to arms, and the little "foot- 
 note to French history" is written on such a 
 sustained level of affectionate enthusiasm 
 that it strikes you, despite its theme of blood 
 and loss, as almost a gay little book. Mon- 
 sieur Henri is one of her own chosen ex- 
 emplars, a gallant figure in the martyrology 
 of the world, of those who, to paraphrase 
 her almost envious tribute, are willing to spill 
 their lives as a libation to the gods. 
 
 The Little English Gallery, six biograph- 
 ical essays in her individual manner of a con- 
 densed bewilderment of research, holds the 
 seed of what might be accounted her life 
 work. For not only does her portrait pen 
 paint you a fine enduring picture of Lady 
 Danvers, Farquhar, Beauclerk, Langton and 
 Hazlitt, but here also is the preface, as it 
 might be called, of her Henry Vaughan, to 
 78 
 
whose gentle service she bent the inter- 
 mittent work of later years. During that 
 English summer of 1895, she went on pil- 
 grimage to the grave of Vaughan, at Llan- 
 saintffread. This was a part of Wales 
 hardly touched by tourists, for the ubiquitous 
 motor car had not begun its devil's business 
 of shedding profanation over silent ways. 
 To walk here was to withdraw as deeply as 
 you would into the fragrance of past sim- 
 plicities. Louise Guiney was reft away into 
 a trance of inward peace. She trod the paths 
 her poet loved, and she was, also with 
 him, where her mind would ever be, in the 
 seventeenth century. This was one of her 
 ardent quests, her passionate rescues: for 
 Vaughan was forgotten on his own familiar 
 ground. Literally the places that had known 
 him knew him no more. Even his grave had 
 been desecrated by the slow attrition of 
 neglect. A coal shed had encroached on it, 
 coal had fallen on his stone, cans and broken 
 glass littered the sacred spot. The two 
 Americans, in a haste of ruth, cleared the 
 stone with hands and walking sticks, and 
 79 
 
Louise Guiney drew to her two bent and 
 blear-eyed Hodges working near and 
 preached to them Vaughan, the good physi- 
 cian, and his right to the seemliness of an 
 ordered resting-place. And she stayed not 
 in her doing, but called later upon England 
 and America for a fund to put the grave in 
 order and suitably to commemorate the poet. 
 The Vaughan essay, in her own copy of the 
 Little English Gallery, grew thick with notes, 
 confirmatory or expanded, in this browsing 
 over Welsh ground, and the Vaughan editing 
 ran on and on through following years into 
 what must be the authoritative edition of his 
 work. Why did she so love and serve him? 
 Not only because his thoughts take hold on 
 heaven and, like the breath of man, fly up- 
 ward, that spirit of devotion — the negation 
 of earthly desires so intoxicating to her — but 
 because he might otherwise, as in his own 
 elegies, "stop short of immortality." His 
 silent footstep seemed to have left no mark 
 beside his darling Usk. His soul, like her 
 own, in never questioning acceptance, per- 
 petually sought eternity. He loved learning, 
 80 
 
and he had an "eye and ear for the green 
 earth." He had also a "sweet self-privacy," 
 and his inexhaustible delight in the created 
 world was not impaired or qualified by his 
 childlike love of heaven. He is temperate, 
 he is remote. Louise Guiney would have 
 loved to walk and laugh with him, for he 
 was one of the few with whom she chose to 
 dwell. To know him a little is to know her 
 better, not so much from their likeness, but 
 to learn what minds were dear to her. 
 
 Hazlitt, too, was dear. He, it must be 
 remembered, like Charles Lamb, Izaak Wal- 
 ton and the more authentic of the older 
 worthies, was her godfather in letters. He, 
 too, had remoteness, though of another sort 
 than Vaughan's. Not for him withdrawal 
 into the heaven of heavens, but to Winter- 
 slow Hut, to write his Lectures in a pas- 
 sionate privacy. Him, too, in 1895, she 
 sought in his familiar haunts, and relished 
 her cold chicken at Llangollen in a happy 
 maze, in that Hazlitt had sat down there to 
 the same fare and the New Eloi'se. At Wem, 
 in Shropshire, where he had his immortal 
 81 
 
meeting with Coleridge, she came, through 
 much pains, upon an oldest inhabitant who 
 could give her faint shrilling echoes of "Billy 
 'Azlitt" in his youth, yet nothing more perti- 
 nent than that the yeasty Billy used to "lie 
 under the 'edges and frighten the maids 
 a-going to market." To Winterslow Hut 
 she went, on Salisbury Plain, an enchantment 
 of larks and heather, and fain would have 
 carried away the old discarded sign of the 
 Pheasant Inn it had become save that it was 
 "so mortal heavy." 
 
 If her own Goose-Quill Papers show the 
 parentage she owns, it is preeminently of 
 Hazlitt. She was enamored of him, his 
 amiable and delightful style that is not too 
 homespun for the scholar nor in any wise 
 too recondite for men of lowlier apprehen- 
 sion. And if the intellect of man has loves 
 of its own, quite apart from inclinations of 
 the heart, Hazlitt may be said to be the 
 friend and comrade of affectionate minds. 
 Indeed, his authoritative note in criticism was 
 the less beguiling to her who could be out- 
 spoken herself, on high occasion, than some 
 82 
 
personal quality of sensitive receptiveness to 
 life. This was, to her, most endearing. He 
 had, moreover, the courage of withstanding 
 great upheavals and lamenting lost causes; 
 she loved his love of walking, and one line she 
 is never tired of quoting or prompting her 
 friends to quote for the enhancement of some 
 page: "a winding road and a three-hours' 
 march to dinner." His aloofness, albeit with 
 the foil of the kindest of hearts, his sensitive- 
 ness that could, by a word or a look askance, 
 be cut to the raw, — do not these perhaps 
 admit him to the list of the humanly ill- 
 equipped who enlist her chivalry? Or was 
 it his humor that was the living bond, that 
 and his clarity of English ? To his Unitarian 
 cast of temperament she is handsomely gen- 
 erous, and though not always averse to giving 
 those who wear their rue of faith with a 
 difference a sly dig on occasion ("the 
 timid, domestic and amateurish thing which 
 Anglicanism must be, even at its bestl" that, 
 one must believe, with a twinkle behind 
 "those spectacles") she tolerates his igno- 
 rance of sacerdotal certainties and not too 
 83 
 
curtly deprecates his "imperfect develop- 
 ment." 
 
 "As Mr. Arnold said so patiently of 
 Byron, 'he did not know enough.' " 
 
 Yet she could have better spared a more 
 ecclesiastic man, and in her affectionate 
 summing up she ^ decorates him with her 
 heartfelt thankfulness that he is what he is : 
 
 "He stalks apart in state, the splendid 
 Pasha of English letters." 
 
 She is forced to judge him as the pure in- 
 tellectual must judge the man of tumultuous 
 and undirected genius. His confidential 
 egoism might well have been her own despair, 
 so disinclined is she really to open her heart 
 to you save under pretty disguises, and you 
 would hardly have thought his style, soaring 
 "to the rhetorical sublime" or dropping to 
 "hard Saxon slang" to be the style she loved. 
 Yet this was she who did not choose her 
 friends for the intellectual Tightness in them 
 but something pure human, as wayward, 
 when you would define it, as the tang of the 
 weather. Toward the close of this essay she 
 rushes into some fine direct English of her 
 84 
 
own. Hazlitt's diction, she affirms, is "joy- 
 ously clear," "sumptuously splendid" and 
 concludes that "no right style was ever 
 founded save out of a sincere heart." This, 
 later on when life had taught her things hard 
 to learn, she said, in a fuller form, as touch- 
 ing not style but letters in their entirety : 
 "After all, life, not art, is the thing." 
 To that same growing conviction it was 
 that Hazlitt appealed, a "born humanist," 
 with a "memory like a loadstar, and a name 
 which is a toast to be drunk standing." 
 
 Her bright light — perhaps not the guiding 
 light, for her genius was ever an individual 
 one and moved, for the most part, unper- 
 turbed in its own orbit — was Robert Louis 
 Stevenson. The youth of his day will re- 
 member how he took hold on even the popu- 
 lar imagination, fighting his predestined fight 
 with disease and weather, doubling on death, 
 and, while he fled — the hovering fate bound, 
 in the end, to clutch him — setting his mind 
 to the weaving of bright adventure and his 
 hand to the writing of it. That gayety of 
 temperamental bravado, that piquing drama 
 
 85 
 
of a man tied to his bed for helpless intervals 
 and sending out his mind to roam the seas 
 and centuries, were intoxicating to venture- 
 some spirits. In 1895, Louise Guiney writes 
 of hearing from a "most brilliant boy" in 
 San Francisco: 
 
 "He says something that has set me up 
 for life: that Mrs. Stevenson told him 
 R. L. S. had a great fancy for my little 
 doings, and used to 'search for them in such 
 magazines as came to Samoa.' I will keep 
 on writing, I will ; I shall never despair after 
 that." 
 
 To Robert Louis Stevenson : A Study, pri- 
 vately printed in 1895, she contributed a 
 notable sonnet, the sestette beginning: 
 "Louis, our priest of letters and our knight," 
 
 and a longer Valediction of a metre disturb- 
 ing to the unpractised ear, but full of isolated 
 lines of an individual beauty and also of a 
 real grief: the lament of the pupil over his 
 master, signalized in the significant line : 
 
 "The battle dread is on us now, riding afield alone." 
 
 There is a light-heartedness, too, about the 
 86 
 
poem, like burnished fringes on a mourning 
 robe. For youth is in it as well as sorrow. 
 Her lamentation can break into the iridescent 
 foam of a stanza like this, where she pre- 
 figures the living spirit of Tusitala absorbed 
 into the island life he loved and blossoming 
 from it forever: 
 
 "There on summer's holy hills 
 In illumined calms, 
 Smile of Tusitala thrills 
 Through a thousand palms; 
 There in a rapture breaks 
 Dawn on the seas, 
 
 When Tusitala from his shoon unbinds 
 the Pleiades." 
 
 Who could spare that outburst of young 
 extravagance at the end? 
 
 It was she who, in the first shock of the 
 news, when the wondering word went from 
 lip to lip, "Stevenson is dead!" — as if long 
 apprehension could never have prepared us 
 for a calamity so amazing — said to those at 
 one with her in Stevenson worship : 
 
 "Let us wear a band of crepe." 
 
 And they did, this group of mourning fol- 
 lowers. 
 
 87 
 
The complete bibliography of her work 
 would include introductions, studies, notes, 
 all characterized by her unhastened scrutiny 
 of "passionate yesterdays" : Matthew 
 Arnold, Robert Emmet, Katherine Philips, 
 Thomas Stanley, Lionel Johnson, Edmund 
 Campion, — these were a few of those whose 
 memory she illumined and clarified. No 
 estimate could overrate her continuing and 
 exhaustless patience; she was content with 
 nothing less than living within arm's length 
 of all the centuries. Poet first, poet 
 in feeling always, even after the rude circum- 
 stance of life had closed her singing lips, she 
 was an undaunted craftsman at prose. It is 
 true she did expect too much of us. She did, 
 especially In those later days, more than half 
 believe we could delight In pouncing, with her 
 own triumphant agility, on discoveries of 
 remote relationships and evasive dates. Her 
 multiplicity of detail had become so minute 
 and comprehensive, especially as touching the 
 Restoration, that even literary journals could 
 seldom print her with any chance of backing 
 88 
 
from the average reader. It was inevitable 
 to her to run on into the merely accurate data 
 prized by the historian and genealogist alone. 
 Who can expect the modern spirit, prey to 
 one sociological germ after another, to find 
 antidote in the obscurities of seventeenth 
 century English ? Yet she never veered from 
 the natal bent of her trained mind. Still was 
 she the indomitable knight errant of letters. 
 She had to go on rescuing though the damsels 
 she delivered died on her hands. Where 
 did her anxiety of pains find its limit? not 
 with the printing: there she had always 
 striven untiringly for perfection of form, un- 
 blemished accuracy. One remembers exhaus- 
 tive talks with her on the subtleties of punc- 
 tuation. The Wye Valley, the Devon lanes, 
 were vocal, in that summer of 1895, with 
 precepts of typography. The colon espe- 
 cially engaged the attention of these perfervid 
 artisans. Was it not, this capricious and yet 
 most responsive of all marks of punctuation, 
 widely neglected in its supremest subtlety? 
 Something of this argumentation was after- 
 89 
 
ward echoed in her paper on Lionel John- 
 son: 
 
 "Nothing was trivial to this 'enamoured 
 architect' of perfection. He cultivated a half 
 mischievous attachment to certain antique 
 forms of spelling, and to the colon, which 
 our slovenly press will have none of ; and be- 
 cause the colon stands for fine differentiations 
 and sly sequences, he delighted especially to 
 employ it." 
 
 There were serious conclaves, in those 
 years, when excerpts for the Pilgrim Scrip, a 
 magazine of travel, were concerned, whether 
 a man's punctuation, being the reflex of his 
 own individuality, should not be preserved In 
 exactness. An English essayist of the nomad 
 tj^e, who was a very fiend of eccentricity, 
 proved an undevoured bone of contention. 
 His stops were enough to make the tj^o- 
 graphically judicious grieve. But had not 
 he his own idea of the flow of his prose, and 
 should not his punctuation be inviolate? Her 
 own corrected proofs were a discipline to 
 the uninitiate in scholarly ways, a despair, no 
 doubt, to the indurated printer, and her ruth- 
 90 
 
lessness toward her own work such as Roman 
 and Spartan parents would have gasped at 
 and found themselves too lax to emulate. 
 Yet through these excesses of literary pre- 
 cision she went merrily. She was no Round- 
 head of the pen, taking her task in sadness. 
 The ordinary proof reader, of set intentions 
 and literal meanings, was her delight. In 
 Songs at the Start is the line : 
 
 "O the oar that was once so merry!" 
 
 One of the battles she fought untiringly was 
 over the vocative O, contending that it should 
 never be followed by the intrusive comma. 
 Yet the comma would sneak in, 
 
 ("Abra was ready ere I called her name; 
 And though I called another, Abra came!") 
 
 and in this case author and printer had fought 
 it out, forward and back, unwearied play of 
 rapier and bludgeon, until she wrote, properly 
 enisled in the margin, after the careted O: 
 "no comma." And behold! the line ap- 
 peared, in the final proof : 
 
 "O no comma the oar that was once so merry!" 
 91 
 
And when, after another tussle with her 
 mulish adversary, she thought she had him, 
 the book itself fell open in her hand at his 
 victorious finale : 
 
 "O no, the oar that was once so merry!" 
 
 The tale of her defeat was perennially de- 
 lightful to her. She was never tired of 
 telling it. 
 
 Once, quoting the line : 
 
 "Hoyden May threw her wild mantle on the 
 hawthorn tree," 
 
 she was enraptured to see the innocent haw- 
 thorn walking back to her personified into 
 "hoyden Mary." The vision of hoyden 
 Mary, concrete as Audrey and her turnip, 
 was thenceforth one of the character studies 
 on her comedy stage. Her own copies of 
 her books were flecked with spear dints from 
 the battles she had waged in their doing 
 and undoing. The "passion for perfection" 
 left her in no security in an end seemingly at- 
 tained. Her pen knew no finalities. When 
 she had reached the goal and you ran to 
 crown her, she simply turned about to go over 
 92 
 
the course again at a more uniform pace or 
 with a prettier action. Her biographical and 
 critical work was never finished, even when 
 it reached the final fastnesses of print. A 
 new shade of insight would be cast by some 
 small leaf of data just sprung up, to be noted 
 in the margin. And how moved she was over 
 the restoration of an old word to active use 
 or shy experiment with one of valid lineage 
 yet unaccustomed form! One remembers 
 serious, even anxious, conversation with her 
 on the word "stabile." It was more poetic 
 than other derivatives of the same root and 
 had a subtly dignified access of meaning. 
 Should it be used? Could one venture? 
 And she did use it in the first printing of what 
 became the last Oxford Sonnet, only, in her 
 anxious precision, to revert to the author- 
 ized "stable" in the last printing of all. 
 
 Of her one book of stories, Lovers' Saint 
 Ruth (1894) written in a rather wistful re- 
 sponse to optimistic persuasion, she says : 
 "I had no hold whatever on narrative." 
 And how should she have taken hold on 
 beguiling and effective drama, she whose 
 
 93 
 
inner mind, when it was not musing in 
 mediaeval cloisters, was hedged about with 
 tolerances, who was not shaken by the 
 tempestuous prejudice and fierce resisting 
 passions of which drama is made ? Was she 
 lax In a certain remote acceptance of man- 
 kind so long as it would, like Alexander, get 
 out of the sun whereby she was regarding 
 the Middle Ages or the soul ? Not always : 
 there was In her a sudden unexpected fierce- 
 ness that amazed you, after you thought 
 yourself used to her self-preservative with- 
 drawals. On a delicate piece of literary work 
 where a wife, hideously used, had suffered 
 all things and forgiven all things, she com- 
 mented tersely : 
 
 "Not right. It hinders justice." 
 But as to the book of stories, she entered 
 upon it with premonitory omen and probably 
 did it under a stress of will. For tasks not 
 native to her mind, as well as those remotely 
 capable of being construed into pot boilers, 
 she began "with a little aversion," — indeed, 
 with so much more than a little that the mere 
 94 
 
suggestion of them was usually declined as 
 soon as offered. 
 
 Like Henry James, she was an expatriate, 
 though not even under the argument of our 
 aloofness from Europe between 1914 and 
 19 17 did she, like him, bear testimony to her 
 love for England by becoming naturalized. 
 Still an ardent American, her answering love 
 flowed back to us as in 1898, when she dedi- 
 cated one of the most breathlessly beautiful 
 of her poems to The Outbound Republic. 
 There had come the challenge to enter world 
 counsels and world clashes. We heard, and 
 she heard it with us : 
 
 "As the clear mid-channel wave, 
 That under a Lammas dawn 
 Her orient lanthorn held 
 Steady and beautiful 
 Through the trance of the sunken tide, 
 Sudden leaps up and spreads 
 Her signal round the sea : 
 Time, time! 
 Time to awake; to arm; 
 To scale the difficult shore!" 
 
 This was first published anonymously and 
 one reader, at least, instantly detected her 
 95 
 
hand. It took no special acumen. Lines were 
 never written more intensely charged with 
 personal quality. 
 
 And if we think her heart, in its love for 
 England, ever grew alien to us, we may go 
 back to the last of the twelve stately London 
 Sonnets : In the Docks. What a banner she 
 waved there of an implied creed, a passionate 
 belief! . 
 
 "Where the bales thunder till the day is done, 
 And the wild sounds with wilder odors cope ; 
 Where over crouching sail and coiling rope, 
 Lascar and Moor along the gangway run ; 
 Where stifled Thames spreads in the pallid 
 
 sun, 
 A hive of anarchy from slope to slope ; 
 Flag of my birth, my liberty, my hope, 
 I see thee at the masthead, joyous one! 
 
 O thou good guest! so oft as, young and warm, 
 To the home-wind thy hoisted colors bound, 
 Away, away from this too thoughtful ground 
 Sated with human trespass and despair. 
 Thee only, from the desert, from the storm, 
 A sick mind follows into Eden air." 
 
 Our inherited traditions were like wine to 
 
 her, our lapses drained her soul; and as it 
 
 was in 1890, when that sonnet was written, 
 
 so it continued to be through the years when 
 
 96 
 
our star sank, in 19 14, to be so long in rising. 
 In 1915, she wrote: 
 
 "I have been disappointed over our coun- 
 try's official attitude : there should be no 'neu- 
 trality' of opinion where rights and wrongs 
 are as plain as the nose on one's face !" 
 
 And in February, 1917 : 
 
 " 'Come, let your broadsides roar with 
 ours !' as Tennyson says. Only I never shall 
 get over the unexpected and staggering vision 
 of my own idealistic land having behaved 
 for nearly three solid years in this selfish, 
 provincial way, with the masterly vision of 
 a village schoolmaster who sees as far as his 
 village pump, and not one inch beyond it." 
 
 When she went to England for the second 
 time, lights were burning, just lighted then: 
 Lionel Johnson, soon to die, William Wat- 
 son, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, 
 Nora Hopper, Katherine Tynan, Dora 
 Sigerson, in her young beauty, (afterward 
 married to Clement Shorter, another devoted 
 friend of L. I. G.) and W. B. Yeats— their 
 glittering names are many. And there was 
 Herbert Clarke, tragic figure of non-fulfil- 
 
 97 
 
ment, without mention of whom no footnote 
 to her life would be complete, because they 
 were mirrors of kindred tastes and proud 
 aloofness from the market-place. He died 
 before he knew the heart-break of the War, 
 and Louise Guiney wrote : 
 
 "And now his bright thwarted star is out, 
 at least in this world where he never had 
 his dues. . . . Thinking of him gone away 
 is to think of what Dickens calls in Bleak 
 House 'the world which sets this world 
 right.' " 
 
 Edmund Gosse, Richard Garnett, Mrs. 
 Meynell, — the list of her friendships rivals 
 in fulness that of her beginnings in America. 
 And those of the first years were but the be- 
 ginning. Today they are numbered "in 
 battalions." 
 
 Though so ardent an American, England 
 was her spirit's home. The odor of musty 
 archives was as delicious in her nostrils as 
 "hawthorn buds in May." Half effaced in- 
 scriptions were dearer to her than whole 
 broadsides of modern pasans to success. A 
 crusader knight on his back in some im- 
 98 
 
memorial dimness was as immediate to her 
 soul as Apollo walking down the aisles of 
 song. London, when she was away from it, 
 haunted her "like a passion." To come upon 
 her great little picture of pre-war London 
 makes a blessed interlude in the shrieking 
 present. For we have gained the motor car, 
 and the price the smiling gods exacted is that 
 we have lost the broodingness of cities — 
 their murmurous tranquillity. That essay, 
 Quiet London, dated 1890, has heart-break 
 in it, as well as beauty, for those who knew 
 the London of old and who will see it no 
 more. Here are the very lineaments of that 
 great fog-soaked, rain-darkened beneficence 
 and terror which once was London. You 
 walk in it with her and are at home In an 
 inherited peace. 
 
 "There is no congestion of the populace; 
 yet the creeks and coves of that ancient sea 
 remain brimmed with mortality, hour after 
 hour, century after century, as if in subjec- 
 tion to a fixed moon. It is the very poise of 
 energy, the aggregation of so much force 
 that all force is at a standstill; the miracu- 
 99 
 
lous moment, indefinitely prolonged, when 
 achieved fruition becalms itself at the full, 
 and satiety hesitates to set in." 
 
 Here is the rain-swept atmosphere : 
 
 "The hushing rain, from a windless sky, 
 falls in sheets of silver on gray, gray on 
 violet, violet on smouldering purple, and 
 anon makes whole what it had hardly riven : 
 the veil spun of nameless analogic tints, 
 which brings up the perspective of every 
 road, the tapestry of sun-shot mist which 
 Theophile Gautier admired once with all his 
 eyes. ... At the angles of the grimiest 
 places, choked with trade, we stumble on lit<- 
 tie old bearded graveyards, pools of ances- 
 tral sleep ; or low-lying leafy gardens where 
 monks and guildsmen have had their dream : 
 closes inexpressibly pregnant with peace, the 
 caesural pauses of our loud to-day." 
 
 In her ecstatic browsings, her rapt with- 
 drawal into old centuries, she was the best 
 Londoner of them all. And here is her gay 
 tribute to English weather: 
 
 "The mannerly, vertical showers . . . 
 fall sudden and silent, like unbidden tears, 
 loo 
 
while you look forth from the wild purple 
 coast of Ireland at the slant and tawny fish- 
 ing sails, or lean against the wall of a ruined 
 abbey in the fold of the Mendip Hills. Al- 
 ways at your side is this gentle, fickle, sun- 
 shot rain, spinning itself out of an undark- 
 ened sky, and keeping the grass immortal and 
 the roads pure of dust. You reach, before 
 long, to a full sympathy and comprehension 
 of what good Bishop Jeremy Taylor had be- 
 fore him when he drew his simile of 'a soft 
 slap of affectionate rain.' It is the rain of 
 the Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, and Han- 
 overians, the immemorial law-giver, and the 
 oldest inhabitant of the isles. Wheresoever 
 it descends, there are perpetual freshness and 
 peace." 
 
 To walk with her was to add day to storied 
 day in a calendar rubricated from end to end. 
 
 "Nor ever can those trees be bare." 
 
 Still living in the English landscape is that 
 alert figure, rapt yet ready for the absurdities 
 of the moment, silent in understanding with- 
 drawals and, in her own words of another, 
 
 lOI 
 
"almost as good company as a dog." This 
 was a masterpiece of praise by inversion, and 
 "those spectacles" gleamed over it prodigi- 
 ously. One remembers her by the crested 
 blue of Devon and Cornish seas, subdued into 
 stillness and then breaking out in a wild hail 
 of the 
 
 "cruel, crawling foam!" 
 
 One remembers her on a Midland road, 
 sticking a pheasant's feather in her hat and 
 swaggering rakishly, or walking into Shrews- 
 bury, so disheveled from the rain and dust 
 of varied weathers, that landladies looked 
 askance, and one, more admittedly curious 
 than the rest, queried: 
 
 "Is there a play to-night?" 
 
 For the two wayfarers did look the ancient 
 part of rogues and vagabonds, no less. 
 
 One remembers her climbing the slope, 
 blue with wild hyacinths, at Haughmond 
 Abbey, or taking the straight "seven long 
 miles" across Egdon Heath, the sun darkened 
 in a livid sky and floods of rain to follow 
 102 
 
before the wayfarers found refuge in the 
 little church where D'Urbervilles lie, signifi- 
 cant in nothing now save an envious immor- 
 tality on Thomas Hardy's page. The clouds 
 in that thunderous sky were piled into im- 
 perial semblances, Emperors of old Rome, 
 and out of their brief pageant sprang Louise 
 Guiney's poem of Romans in Dorset, the first 
 three stanzas as illuminative as the sun and 
 dark that ruled the air: 
 
 "A stupor on the heath, 
 And wrath along the sky; 
 Space everywhere ; beneath 
 A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon 
 on high. 
 
 "Sullen quiet below, 
 But storm in upper air! 
 A wind from long ago, 
 In mouldy chambers of the cloud had ripped an 
 arras there, 
 
 "And singed the triple gloom, 
 And let through, in a flame. 
 Crowned faces of old Rome: 
 Regnant o'er Rome's abandoned ground, proces- 
 sional they came." 
 
 One remembers her, a last rite before leav- 
 ing England, not knowing she should return, 
 103 
 
feeding the doves in Paul's Churchyard and, 
 again at Shrewsbury, packing, among dear 
 mementoes, a sod of English earth. 
 
 To speak of her letters, those floating im- 
 mortalities she cast about with so prodigal a 
 hand, is to wonder anew at an imaginative 
 brilliancy even beyond what she put into her 
 considered work. To open one was an event. 
 Almost you were miserly over the envelope 
 itself, and treasured it, the script on it was 
 of so rare a beauty. For her handwriting 
 had an individual distinction. Done in haste 
 or at leisure, it was the same. Her tumultu- 
 ous jottings on margins of print or bits of 
 scribbling paper kept the line of grace. And 
 the subject matter ! it was as varied as flowers 
 and jewels and shells. In some cases, her 
 books may have suffered from too anxious a 
 care. Her affluent learning, deeply as it en- 
 riched her poetic gift, may have done some- 
 thing toward choking it, burying it under the 
 drift of yesterdays. For having at her 
 memory's call the immortal lines of our Eng- 
 lish tongue, a despair may well have over- 
 104 
 
taken her with the impulse to enter that great 
 company. She lacked the crude yet whole- 
 some audacity of those to whom the world Is 
 young. But if her considered work may 
 possibly have suffered from "much cherish- 
 ing," her letters made their bright advent 
 unhindered. In them she lost her sense of 
 studious responsibilities and — strange para- 
 dox of time ! — it is they who may go farthest 
 toward making her immortal. She was 
 simply not self-conscious about them, and the 
 haste with which they left her hand for the 
 post was what saved them in their living 
 delightfulness. And they were plentiful as 
 leaves in Arden. Never did she let her 
 correspondence "come tardy off." Courteous, 
 good-natured, ever the prey of bores and 
 sympathetic listener to requests and com- 
 ment, she wrote you promptly and with the 
 most engaging personal touch. If you sent 
 her your book, she read it with a painstaking 
 intentness and returned you, not a formal 
 note of thanks, but a full and rich review 
 wherein you were praised to the top of your 
 deserts, your failings touched lightly but 
 105 
 
honestly and your errors spotted with the 
 scholar's acumen. And if she could com- 
 mend you whole-heartedly, and with no even 
 courteous reservations, then she was as happy 
 in the writing as you in reading it. There 
 was no smallest trace in her of carping for 
 the satisfaction of showing how brave a critic 
 she could be, no sense of blustering privilege. 
 But the letters ! written in a gush of mental 
 exuberance, sometimes the faster the better, 
 a tumultuous beauty of diction, — you shook 
 the tree and you got such fruit; the wind of 
 your favor blew her way and unloosed on 
 you that petalled or ripened shower. Those 
 were the spontaneities of her life ; those, in 
 their lasting evanescence, she has yet to be- 
 queath us, a priceless legacy. 
 
 What did the war do to her? We cannot 
 wholly say. We know how deeply she had 
 breathed in the life of Oxford, and that she 
 was among those who suffered pangs over 
 
 "the Oxford men 
 Who went abroad to die." 
 
 There are tenderest and most admiring 
 io6 
 
allusions to this or that boy who stayed not 
 upon the order of his going into khaki. 
 
 "War, warl" was one of the first cries 
 from her. "It is unbelievable, yet it is. Eng- 
 land is on the defensive : God save her, I 
 say! Boys I know are being rushed off in 
 the Territorials and Reserves to keep the 
 coast; and there are already rumors that 
 there will be no October Term for the Uni- 
 versity. . . . Terly-terlol as the trumpets 
 say in the old Carol. 'If it be not now yet it 
 will come : the readiness is all.' " 
 
 And again, in 1915 : 
 
 "It enrages me to be an Alien 'neutral.' 
 You'll remember the passionate affection I 
 have ever shown for everything German. 
 Bah I" (No need of indicating to those who 
 knew her the thread of irony in this last!) 
 "Would I were at the front. ... If Eng- 
 land doesn't pull through, no more will 
 liberty and civilization." 
 
 And she had her prophetic despondencies. 
 In March, 19 19, she wrote with a bitterness 
 unfamiliar from her bounding pen : 
 
 "Oh, what a rabble of a world it is 1 and 
 107 
 
why did the wretched soft-soapers interrupt 
 Foch by granting that armistice when an- 
 other three weeks of him would have cut the 
 claws of all the Devils forever! A has les 
 civile s!" 
 
 There spoke the unhesitating mind of one 
 who knew the grim job ought to have been 
 effectively ended, the tongue of one who came 
 of soldier blood. 
 
 We may guess that the strain of those last 
 years sapped and undermined her in ways the 
 soldier spirit would not betray. We know 
 she qualified in them for that Paradise she 
 most desired, of those who 
 
 "die, driven against the wall." 
 
 If we seek about for mitigation of our be- 
 wilderment over her loss to earth, the way 
 seems to be not only the old road of unques- 
 tioning thankfulness when a soul arrives at 
 sanctuary from pain, but the solace of a more 
 intimate friendship with her work. Curi- 
 ously personal to her sounds that exquisite 
 translation from Callimachus on the death of 
 his friend, the poet Heraclitus : 
 io8 
 
"They told' me, Heraclitus, they told me you were 
 dead: 
 They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter 
 
 tears to shed. 
 I wept, as I remembered how often you and I 
 Had tired the sun with talking and sent him 
 down the sky. 
 
 "And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian 
 guest, 
 A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest. 
 Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, 
 
 awake; 
 For Death, he taketh all away, but these he can- 
 not take." 
 
 Of this Edmund Gosse says, in a prose so 
 authoritatively beautiful that it hangs level 
 in the balance with the rich "poetry of 
 elegiacal regret" : 
 
 "No translation ever smelt less of the lamp 
 and more of the violet than this. It is an 
 exquisite addition to a branch of English 
 literature which is already very rich, the 
 poetry of elegiacal regret. I do not know 
 where there is to be found a sweeter or 
 tenderer expression of a poet's grief at the 
 death of a poet- friend, grief -mitigated only 
 by the knowledge that the dead man's songs, 
 his 'nightingales,', are outliving him. It is 
 109 
 
the requiem of friendship, the reward of one 
 who, in Keats's wonderful phrase, has left 
 'great verse unto a little clan,' the last service 
 for the dead to whom it was enough to be 
 'unheard, save of the quiet primrose, and the 
 span of heaven, and few ears.' " ' 
 
 This picture, delicately austere, is fitted, 
 line for line, to the obedient humility of 
 Louise Guiney's life. She wrought in seclu- 
 sion, asking nothing save the silent approval 
 of the unseen gods; and still, in the mysteri- 
 ous thicket of our mortal life, are her "night- 
 ingales" awake. 
 
 In what niche shall we set her statue of 
 renown? She has done the most authentic 
 and exquisite verse America has yet pro- 
 duced. Is it not rather to its honor and our 
 defeated fame that no widespread recogni- 
 tion of it could have been predicted? Is 
 Hazlitt largely read? Does Charles Lamb 
 sell by the million or the seventeenth century 
 lyrists by the hundred thousand? Louise 
 Guiney was, like so much that is austerely 
 beautiful in the modern world, a victim of 
 majorities. The democracy of taste and in- 
 
 IIO 
 
tellect is perhaps the master, perhaps the 
 puppet, of this ironic time. But the time it- 
 self has its martyrs in these children of illus- 
 trious line who cannot, sadly willing as they 
 may be, quite speak the common tongue. It 
 is the suffrages of the purchasing majority 
 that determine what publishers shall print. 
 And for us, — Diana's chariot in the heavens 
 means less to us than a limousine on earth. 
 But the gods who endowed Louise Guiney 
 with something ineffable out of their treasury 
 alone know about these things. Under their 
 eyes stands her slender last collection among 
 its peers. And the book itself says : 
 
 "Unto the One aware from everlasting 
 Dear are the winners: thou art more than they." 
 
 Ill