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"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 keeping

The late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for

me.

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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."

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 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 Apple

Tree Inn, a vegetar 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, The

Kings, its last stap 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."

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 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 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 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 moments

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