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LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

BY

ALICE BROWN

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1921

All rights reserved

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LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

A STUDY

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY was born

in Boston on January 17, 1861, and died at Chipping Campden, England, on November 2, 1920. Of Chipping Campden she had, in 1913, done, in a few strokes, a beguiling little picture comforting now to hang in the mind beside that stark record of her death:

It is, she says, "a stone-built paradise of a village not far from Oxford. There is an April wind blowing, and forty-three roses adorn one cottage doorway just out of sight from here. The old collie and I had a walk yesterday, and I dipped my stick in Shakespeare's Avon at Fledbury."

This was the woman, yet not much changed in high intent and gayest vagabondage from the girl New England—and, in

deed, this western world—uniquely loved. Still, to us, is she a figure of bright beginnings and the swiftest road to her is that backward pathway to her youth.

Her father, General Patrick Robert Guiney, a soldier of the Civil War, was her exemplar and her adoration, and his death an overwhelming grief. "My preux chevalier of a father," she was proud to call him, in a quick flaming up of passionate remembrance. Though he died in her girlhoodand died of his wound, as it fed her ardent soul to remember-she never ceased to feel a living allegiance to him. Her plastic inner life had been molded by him, the picture her mind made of him touched into enduring colors by the manner of his death. There was between them that "marriage of true minds" which is more lastingly productive than the tie of blood, and she was proud if you could trace in her the reflex of those qualities she held highest in him: his active patriotism, his slack hold on life, if it could be nobly given, and a tenacity of devotion to the brave fight. Of her remoter back

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