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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 individual 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.

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."

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, to

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 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 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:

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 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 and

fluency." 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 Esculapius, the tribute of her gentle allegiance to those kingly pagans who loved the light of the sun and shrank

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