taneous as they dropped from the skies and she set them in their chaste enduring gold. Though she was so unwearied in polishing and changing, in their general scope and temper the poems came as from the hand of God, and when her own hand fell too laxly to receive them, they did not come. Her resultant loneliness of mind she accepted with a decorum due the gods who give and take away again; you might almost have called it unconcern. For she was not greedy of life: only grateful for its temperate dole. She might own, under anxious accusation, to having "no luck, no leisure, no liberty," but that was only for the intimates who inevitably "knew."

"As to the Muse," (this in 1916) "she has given me the go by. No matter: this dog has most hugely enjoyed his day, which was Stevenson's day, and Lionel Johnson's, and Herbert Clarke's, and Philip Savage's."

Though the last years of her middle age were the less robust, as to the intellectual life. she had no waning. Her mind was no less. keen nor, except in the sudden exhaustion of

a tragic illness, were her activities dulled. She died young. And though the heart that is the bravado of sheer courage was never allowed to fail her, the bodily heart did fail. Those who had walked with her knew its weakness, and that, a race-horse on the road, she was speedily exhausted in a climb. One day, lost on Exmoor, her walking mate, looking back for her, would find the world empty of her altogether. Knowing the sort of spirit she was, it was easy to guess the Little People had kidnapped her or an archangel hidden her in the brightness of his wings while they discoursed together on topics of the upper sky. But the heather had simply closed over her; she had lain down to rest her tired heart. And as the physical world, out of the strange jealousy of its predestined enmities, is forever fighting the spirit, so the feebler action of a weakening heart might dull those swift spontaneities that are man's answer to the beauty of things-his protest to the earth that cajoles and challenges the while it fulfils its mysterious hostility and overthrows him in the end. In her prose work of editing and

reviewing, the blade was sharper as time wore upon it and she grew more recondite in knowledge and more desperately exact, omitting no extreme of patient scrutiny. But poetry was her youth, and youth was gone. And youth is not a matter of years. It is what the years have done to us.

If we may borrow a tag of appreciation for her verse, we could hardly do better than quote her resumé of Hurrell Froude's, the "clearness, simplicity, orderly thought and noble severity" she found in him.

His poems "have a strong singleness and sad transparency, the tone of them a little chilly, yet almost Virgilian, and arrestingly beautiful; . . . abstinent, concentrated, true."

Now primarily Froude's verse is not in the least like Louise Guiney's. It is scarcely more than the first note leading up the scale. In the amazed apprehension of beauty, he is leagues behind her. Yet the "almost Virgilian" of her comment fits her to perfection. And if she is not always "clear" she is, marvelously again, "a little chilly," with the chill

of spring twilights when earth scents are in the air, the lily-of-the-valley just bloomed out of the cold, or the damp richness of the April woods.

Two little volumes, Monsieur Henri, the story of the Count of La Rochejaquelein (1892) and A Little English Gallery (1894) are of the essence of that exhaustive research and fine rehabilitation which were the fruit of her later years. The war of the Vendée, with its religious appeal, its romance of feudal catchwords, took irresistible hold on her, and the young Count of La Rochejaquelein, blazoned in youthful ardor, shone as the sun. In thus regilding a futile struggle she strives, by discarding political minutiæ, to "romanticize such dry facts as we mean shall live." "A background," she concludes, "may be blurred for the sake of a single figure. I tried, therefore, to paint a portrait, willing to abide by the hard saying of Northcote: 'If a portrait have force, it will do for history.'" Nor could she have resisted him of whom history says, as he mounted and rode away to his feat of arms:

"Then first came the eagle look into his eyes which never left them after."

To Louise Guiney, born to the love of good fighters, the eagle look of courage and consecration was as thrilling as, to the soldier himself, the call to arms, and the little "footnote to French history" is written on such a sustained level of affectionate enthusiasm that it strikes you, despite its theme of blood and loss, as almost a gay little book. Monsieur Henri is one of her own chosen exemplars, a gallant figure in the martyrology of the world, of those who, to paraphrase her almost envious tribute, are willing to spill their lives as a libation to the gods.

The Little English Gallery, six biographical essays in her individual manner of a condensed bewilderment of research, holds the seed of what might be accounted her life work. For not only does her portrait pen paint you a fine enduring picture of Lady Danvers, Farquhar, Beauclerk, Langton and Hazlitt, but here also is the preface, as it might be called, of her Henry Vaughan, to