Chapter 2

“The young sun rides the mists anew; his cohorts follow from the sea.Let Aztec children shout and sue, the Persian lend a thankful knee:Those glad Auroral eyes shall beam not anywhere 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.”

“The young sun rides the mists anew; his cohorts follow from the sea.

Let Aztec children shout and sue, the Persian lend a thankful knee:

Those glad Auroral eyes shall beam not anywhere 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.”

“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 obscurity. But it is so unmistakably one of the first trial flights of the pure lyric in her, it sings so melodiously, that the mere chronology 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 cloistral 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, tothe 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 runaway, 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 pulsesAll 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 saddleWeather-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:We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.“(I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulsesAll 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 troopers that follow.”

“I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulsesAll day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.

“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 saddleWeather-worn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion,With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.

“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.

“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.

“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:We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.

“A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle,

A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty:

We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.

“(I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulsesAll day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.)

“(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 troopers that follow.”

“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 troopers that follow.”

In The Roadside Harp (1893) (and this she calls, as late as 1911, “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 imperishable 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 andfluency.” And, like him, her “genius is happier 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 seventeenth century was her home. She was devoutly Catholic, yet living fibres in her knew the earth as it was in its unsymbolized freshness 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 spiritual 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 Æsculapius, the tribute of her gentle allegiance to those kingly pagans who loved the light of the sun and shrankfrom the “dishonor of the grave,” who knew the face of Nemesis and were, above all, disciples of the law of Aidôs, the negation of excess. In the rich exposition of Gilbert Murray:

“Aidôs implies that, from some subtle emotion inside you, some ruth or shame or reflection, some feeling perhaps of the comparative 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 ambition, 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 ofAttic subjects, like Simoisius, or the Alexandriana 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 continued, 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 devotion, 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 paganheart of her, the heart that was still immovably 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-rootSubduing agonies leap;The field-mouse and the purple mothTurn over amid their sleep;The icicled rocks aloftBurn saffron and blue alway,And trickling and tinklingThe snows of the drift decay.Oh, mine is the head must hangAnd share the immortal pang!Winter or spring is fair;Thaw’s hard to bear.Heigho! my heart’s sick.”

“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 unquestionablyhalt 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 ofvers 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 yoreIn Itchen stream to dip?”

“What trout shall coax the rod of yore

In Itchen stream to dip?”

Months after printing, the incorrigible dissonance of the two opening words struck her and, having no smallest modicum of professional vanity, she must needs admit a friend immediate to her to the excellent fooling of the discovery, and went about shouting, between gusts of mirth: “What trout! what trout!”

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 yoreIn Itchen stream to dip?”

“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 imperishable 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.

“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 keepingThe late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for me.”

“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 keepingThe late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for me.”

“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 twilight, 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 absolute 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.

“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.”

“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 emulated in a not inferior accent in the sombre music of this threnody. Almost, remembering the flowers in Lycidas, you long to strew them on her darling’s grave.

“There is a music fillsThe oaks of Belmont and the Wayland hillsSouthward to Dewing’s little bubbly stream,——The heavenly weather’s call! Oh, who aliveHastes not to start, delays not to arrive,Having free feet that never felt a gyveWeigh, even in a dream?”

“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 AppleTree 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 Hampstead Heath, and the two sat all the afternoon 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, according 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, TheKings, 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.”

“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 abstractions:

“Let claws of lightning clutch meFrom 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.”

“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 exquisiteOf all that shall thee betide;For better than fortune’s bestIs mastery in the using,And sweeter than anything sweetThe art to lay it aside.”

“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.”

Here is the reflective, the scholastic, penetrating 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 galloping at will, now high, now low, from sunrise to the evening star. And this not because 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 suspireAgainst his gift with no inglorious greed,For this is joy, though still our joys recede.”

“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 relinquish with no ado, but a mysterious ardor it was anguish to dream of losing, if she could have besought her Lord, in momentsof 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 chanting 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 beautifulas 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 fireFrom lamps a-row on the sycamore;The bluebird, with his flitting note,Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;The mink is busy; herds againGo hillward in the honeyed rain;The midges meet. I cry to TheeWhose heartRemembers each of these: Thou artMy God who hast forgotten me!”

“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

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 comprehensible because “it is common.” Here is the sum and circle of nature, tagged with the everlasting paradox: the mindlessness and indifference 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 unabashed, articulate, impassioned, the finite crying to the infinite, the perishing atom appealing 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 challenging 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 unmindful of him, set his breath against its blast. When the cry breaks into hysteria, then theman 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, untilThou wilt not have forgotten me,”

“Help me endure the Pit, until

Thou wilt not have forgotten me,”

never challenges her God with mad interrogation. It is not His justice she assails; she but beseeches the quickening of His will to save. There is an immeasurable distance between 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 giveThy sap!”

“As to a weed, to me but give

Thy sap!”

The poem may have been written in the period she calls “my calendar of imprisonments,” perhaps in the two years given over to “nerves.” This includes the eight years from 1894, when she entered the Auburndale post-office, through 1902. They were weighted with the routine work she desperately essayed at post-office and library. The summer of 1895, given to a walkingtrip 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 significant verse did come in here, bright splashes of sunset red on the flat marsh lands of her way. Especially in theannus beatusthere 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 bereavenThe song-thrush and the bee,And the fisher-boy at seaOf his sea-mark in the even;And gourds of cooling shade, to lieWithin the sickle’s sound;And the old sheep-dog’s loyal eyeOf sleep on duty’s ground;And poets of their tentAnd quiet tenement.Ah, impious! who so paidSuch fatherhood, and madeOf murmurous immortality a cargo and a trade.’“For the hewn oak, a century fair,A wound in earth, an ache in air.”

“A word of grief to me erewhile:We have cut the oak down, in our isle.

“A word of grief to me erewhile:

We have cut the oak down, in our isle.

“And I said: ‘Ye have bereavenThe song-thrush and the bee,And the fisher-boy at seaOf his sea-mark in the even;And gourds of cooling shade, to lieWithin the sickle’s sound;And the old sheep-dog’s loyal eyeOf sleep on duty’s ground;And poets of their tentAnd quiet tenement.Ah, impious! who so paidSuch fatherhood, and madeOf murmurous immortality a cargo and a trade.’

“And I said: ‘Ye have bereaven

The song-thrush and the bee,

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.”

“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 unapprehended 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;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!”

“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;

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!”

“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 sensitive 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 oldbeauties 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 accent of farewells. To a friend who challenged the appositeness of the title she said, smiling, it was, on the contrary, exact, for her life of verse was done. In 1917, 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 “Astræa,” her actual farewell, has the poignant sestette:

“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.”

“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 Jerusalem. 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. Shewas 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 something 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 mountingblood as well as the tempered mind. It has, in spite of those who have suffered the horrible 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 intent 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 spontaneousas 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 having “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 ofa 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, looking 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 forever 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 andreviewing, 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 resumé 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 Virgilian” of her comment fits her to perfection. And if she is not always “clear” she is, marvelously again, “a little chilly,” with the chillof 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 research and fine rehabilitation which were the fruit of her later years. The war of the Vendée, with its religious appeal, its romance of feudal catchwords, took irresistible hold on her, and the young Count of La Rochejaquelein, blazoned in youthful ardor, shone as the sun. In thus regilding a futile struggle she strives, by discarding political minutiæ, 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 history.’” Nor could she have resisted him of whom history says, as he mounted and rode away to his feat of arms:

“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 “footnote 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. Monsieur Henri is one of her own chosen exemplars, 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 biographical essays in her individual manner of a condensed 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, towhose gentle service she bent the intermittent work of later years. During that English summer of 1895, she went on pilgrimage to the grave of Vaughan, at Llansaintffread. 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 simplicities. 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, andLouise Guiney drew to her two bent and blear-eyed Hodges working near and preached to them Vaughan, the good physician, 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 upward, 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, perpetually sought eternity. He loved learning,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 Walton 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 Winterslow Hut, to write his Lectures in a passionate 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 Eloïse. At Wem, in Shropshire, where he had his immortalmeeting 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 pertinent 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 preëminently 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 apprehension. 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 outspoken herself, on high occasion, than somepersonal 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 sensitiveness 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 generous, 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 best!” that, one must believe, with a twinkle behind “those spectacles”) she tolerates his ignorance of sacerdotal certainties and not toocurtly deprecates his “imperfect development.”

“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 intellectual 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 rightness 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 herown. Hazlitt’s diction, she affirms, is “joyously 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 touching 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, unperturbed in its own orbit—was Robert Louis Stevenson. The youth of his day will remember how he took hold on even the popular 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 dramaof a man tied to his bed for helpless intervals and sending out his mind to roam the seas and centuries, were intoxicating to venturesome 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, privately 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 disturbing 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 thepoem, 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:

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