curtly deprecates his "imperfect development."

"As Mr. Arnold said so patiently of Byron, 'he did not know enough.'"

Yet she could have better spared a more ecclesiastic man, and in her affectionate summing up she decorates him with her heartfelt thankfulness that he is what he is:

"He stalks apart in state, the splendid Pasha of English letters."

She is forced to judge him as the pure intellectual must judge the man of tumultuous and undirected genius. His confidential egoism might well have been her own despair, so disinclined is she really to open her heart to you save under pretty disguises, and you would hardly have thought his style, soaring "to the rhetorical sublime" or dropping to "hard Saxon slang" to be the style she loved. Yet this was she who did not choose her friends for the intellectual rightness in them but something pure human, as wayward, when you would define it, as the tang of the weather. Toward the close of this essay she rushes into some fine direct English of her

own. Hazlitt's diction, she affirms, is "joyously clear," "sumptuously splendid" and concludes that "no right style was ever founded save out of a sincere heart." This, later on when life had taught her things hard to learn, she said, in a fuller form, as touching not style but letters in their entirety:

"After all, life, not art, is the thing."

To that same growing conviction it was that Hazlitt appealed, a "born humanist," with a "memory like a loadstar, and a name which is a toast to be drunk standing."

Her bright light-perhaps not the guiding light, for her genius was ever an individual one and moved, for the most part, unperturbed in its own orbit-was Robert Louis Stevenson. The youth of his day will remember how he took hold on even the popular imagination, fighting his predestined fight with disease and weather, doubling on death, and, while he fled the hovering fate bound, in the end, to clutch him-setting his mind to the weaving of bright adventure and his hand to the writing of it. That gayety of temperamental bravado, that piquing drama

of a man tied to his bed for helpless intervals and sending out his mind to roam the seas and centuries, were intoxicating to venturesome spirits. In 1895, Louise Guiney writes of hearing from a "most brilliant boy" in San Francisco:

"He says something that has set me up for life: that Mrs. Stevenson told him R. L. S. had a great fancy for my little doings, and used to 'search for them in such magazines as came to Samoa.' I will keep on writing, I will; I shall never despair after that."

To Robert Louis Stevenson: A Study, privately printed in 1895, she contributed a notable sonnet, the sestette beginning:

"Louis, our priest of letters and our knight," and a longer Valediction of a metre disturbing to the unpractised ear, but full of isolated lines of an individual beauty and also of a real grief: the lament of the pupil over his master, signalized in the significant line: "The battle dread is on us now, riding afield alone."

There is a light-heartedness, too, about the

poem, like burnished fringes on a mourning robe. For youth is in it as well as sorrow. Her lamentation can break into the iridescent foam of a stanza like this, where she prefigures the living spirit of Tusitala absorbed into the island life he loved and blossoming from it forever:

"There on summer's holy hills
In illumined calms,

Smile of Tusitala thrills
Through a thousand palms;

There in a rapture breaks

Dawn on the seas,

When Tusitala from his shoon unbinds
the Pleiades."

Who could spare that outburst of young extravagance at the end?

It was she who, in the first shock of the news, when the wondering word went from lip to lip, "Stevenson is dead!”—as if long apprehension could never have prepared us for a calamity so amazing-said to those at one with her in Stevenson worship:

"Let us wear a band of crêpe."

And they did, this group of mourning followers.

The complete bibliography of her work would include introductions, studies, notes, all characterized by her unhastened scrutiny of "passionate yesterdays": Matthew Arnold, Robert Emmet, Katherine Philips, Thomas Stanley, Lionel Johnson, Edmund Campion, these were a few of those whose memory she illumined and clarified. No estimate could overrate her continuing and exhaustless patience; she was content with nothing less than living within arm's length of all the centuries. Poet first, poet in feeling always, even after the rude circumstance of life had closed her singing lips, she was an undaunted craftsman at prose. It is true she did expect too much of us. She did, especially in those later days, more than half believe we could delight in pouncing, with her own triumphant agility, on discoveries of remote relationships and evasive dates. Her multiplicity of detail had become so minute and comprehensive, especially as touching the Restoration, that even literary journals could seldom print her with any chance of backing