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And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring,

Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown?

"Yet in the valley,

At a turn of the orchard alley,

When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air,

Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee,

Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee,

O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired! O first and final Fair!"

The line:

"Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown,"

is one of those pervasive beauties which, though in a perfect simplicity, invoke the universal that is beauty's self. You see in it or you fancy, for it falls on the sensitive plate of emotion that far outranks your intellect all the faces of all the dead from the shepherd slain outside Eden past the Pharaohs and queens that "died young and fair" to him "that died o' Wednesday." Happy Ending is her renewed hail and

her farewell.

Here are some of the old

beauties and, gathered up with them, the later buds of a more sparsely blossoming fancy, snowed under time and yesterday. It is a sad book, for all its nobility; it breathes the accent of farewells. To a friend who challenged the appositeness of the title she said, smiling, it was, on the contrary, exact, for her life of verse was done. In 1917, she

wrote:

"The Muse, base baggage that she is, fled long ago. (I knew what I was up to when I called it Happy Ending.)"

The additions of this later period are slightly more involved, much more austere. The world does not call to her now in the manifold voices of that vernal time when she and her dog went field-faring. It is a spot, though still dearly loved, to leave. In Beati Mortui she celebrates the "dead in spirit" who, having renounced the trappings of a delusive day, are henceforth like angel visitants in a world where they hold no foot of vain desire. The sonnet "Astræa," her actual farewell, has the poignant sestette:

"Are ye unwise who would not let me love
you?

Or must too bold desires be quieted?
Only to ease you, never to reprove you,
I will go back to heaven with heart unfed:
Yet sisterly I turn, I bend above you,

To kiss (ah, with what sorrow!) all my dead."

Next to the Golden City of belief she had, as she began, continued to love poetry, the making of it, the "love of lovely words." And though an initiate world had hailed her, when, like a young shepherd wandered into town, a bewildering "strayed reveller," she came "singing along the way," man had been finding out many inventions and kept no ear for strains out of Arcady or long notes prophetically echoed from the New Jerusalem. He was laying the foundations of a taste which was to flower in jazz and the movies and the whirling of wheels on great white ways. She had her own small public always. To these, her books were cool colonnades with the sea at the end. But she had learned, now with no shadow of doubt, that there would never be any wider response from the world of the printed word. She

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was not, in the modern sense, "magazinable." Editors were not laying up treasure in the safety deposits of the immortalities; they were nursing their subscription lists. If she had kept on singing, it would have been into that silence whence the poet's voice echoes back to him with a loneliness terrifying to hear. Need that dull his fancy and mute his tongue? Not in youth, perhaps. When the blood flows boundingly, you write your verses on green leaves, so they are written, and if nobody wants the woven chaplet of them, you laugh and cast it on the stream. Through the middle years it is different. You must be quickened by an unquenchable self-belief or warmed at the fire of men's responsive sympathy to write at all. There is something in the hurt an unheeding world can deal you that, besides draining the wounded heart, stiffens the brain and hand. And Atalanta's pace may be slackened by the misadventures of the way. Her sandal may come loose, or she slips on a pebble and strains the tendon of that flying foot.

For poetry is a matter of the mounting

blood as well as the tempered mind. It has, in spite of those who have suffered the horrible disaster of physical overthrow and yet have kept on singing, something intimately dependent on the actual coursing of the blood, the beat of the physical heart. The only verse Louise Guiney prized, was the verse with wings, spontaneous as the gestures of childhood or the oriole's song. She could knock her lines into a wild ruin and rebuild, but that was after the first swift assembling of stone on stone. Any idea of verse soberly and slowly evolved, as an intellectual feat, was afar from her. "Our best things," she said, "are the easiest. They're no trouble." They did cost, in the last sweet pangs of intent consideration, of rearranging, polishing, and hunting down the best and only word. When the poetic impulse seized her, she bent to it in obedient delight. She never coaxed or beckoned. Only into the living spring did she dip her cup: no thrifty piping it to the house in forethought of the day when the frost creeps and "no birds sing." The greatest beauties in her verse were as spon-、

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