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 immortalities 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 tumultuous 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 enriched her poetic gift, may have done something toward choking it, burying it under the drift of yesterdays. For having at her memory's call the immortal lines of our English tongue, a despair may well have over

taken her with the impulse to enter that great company. She lacked the crude yet wholesome 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 paradox 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 comment, 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

honestly and your errors spotted with the scholar's acumen. And if she could commend 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 bequeath 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

allusions to this or that boy who stayed not upon the order of his going into khaki.

"War, war!" was one of the first cries from her. "It is unbelievable, yet it is. England 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 University. . . . Terly-terlo! as the trumpets in the old Carol. 'If it be not now yet it will come: the readiness is all.'"

say

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!" (No need of indicating to those who knew her the thread of irony in this last!) "Would I were at the front. . . . If England doesn't pull through, no more will liberty and civilization."

And she had her prophetic despondencies. In March, 1919, she wrote with a bitterness unfamiliar from her bounding pen:

"Oh, what a rabble of a world it is! and

why did the wretched soft-soapers interrupt Foch by granting that armistice when another three weeks of him would have cut the claws of all the Devils forever! A bas les civiles!"

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 bewilderment over her loss to earth, the way seems to be not only the old road of unquestioning thankfulness when a soul arrives at sanctuary from pain, but the solace of a more intimate friendship with her work. Curiously personal to her sounds that exquisite translation from Callimachus on the death of his friend, the poet Heraclitus: