"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 cannot 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

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 seclusion, asking nothing save the silent approval of the unseen gods; and still, in the mysterious thicket of our mortal life, are her "nightingales" awake.

In what niche shall we set her statue of renown? She has done the most authentic and exquisite verse America has yet produced. Is it not rather to its honor and our defeated fame that no widespread recognition 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

tellect is perhaps the master, perhaps the puppet, of this ironic time. But the time itself has its martyrs in these children of illustrious 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."