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 subjection 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

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 Théophile Gautier admired once with all his eyes. . . . At the angles of the grimiest places, choked with trade, we stumble on lit tle old bearded graveyards, pools of ancestral sleep; or low-lying leafy gardens where monks and guildsmen have had their dream: closes inexpressibly pregnant with peace, the cæsural pauses of our loud to-day."

In her ecstatic browsings, her rapt withdrawal 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,

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while you look forth from the wild purple coast of Ireland at the slant and tawny fishing sails, or lean against the wall of a ruined abbey in the fold of the Mendip Hills. Always at your side is this gentle, fickle, sunshot rain, spinning itself out of an undarkened 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 before him when he drew his simile of 'a soft slap of affectionate rain.' It is the rain of the Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, and Hanoverians, 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 withdrawals and, in her own words of another,

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"almost as good company as a dog." This was a masterpiece of praise by inversion, and "those spectacles" gleamed over it prodigiously. 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 Shrewsbury, 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

before the wayfarers found refuge in the little church where D'Urbervilles lie, significant in nothing now save an envious immortality on Thomas Hardy's page. The clouds in that thunderous sky were piled into imperial 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, processional they came."

One remembers her, a last rite before leaving England, not knowing she should return,