strength, feeling all the while as if she were running a race against Time. When it was within measurable distance of completion,-finished "all except a few loose threads,"her overtaxed powers gave way. At last the time had come when she who had stood up to Fortune after many blows, risen from many illnesses, battled against many obstacles, and forced herself to work assiduously despite failing strength, was now to work no more. The indomitable will, the loving and ardent spirit, had never surrendered; but the mortal body could no longer carry the burden imposed upon it by its stern taskmaster the soul. But she believed her collapse the result only of temporary exhaustion: "My love! and I will write soon," was her message to her Nil Medium' friend, who received at the same time, from another, the tragic news that the end was approaching, with the magnum opus still lacking its final touches and the monument to the fame of Henry Vaughan still unaccomplished. The devoted kinswoman and friend watching beside this fighter whose fights were finished, hesitated to tell her that, barring a miracle, there was no hope. Her friends, dismayed, bewildered, tormented by the thought of one who had been so full of life now scarcely able even to speak her wishes,— turned for comfort to the faith she herself had expressed in one of the most heartfelt of her poems, written while youth, strength and joy still were hers: 1 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, To move our minds with His, and clearer, higher, Thanks to His love let earth and man dispense 1" Summum Bonum," in Ending," p. 105. " A Roadside Harp," p. 41, and "Happy A praying more than prayer: 'Great good have I, Nor can I lose peace, power, permanence, For these smile on me from the thing Thou willest." "Join thy heart to the immortality of God, and become eternal with Him. Whatsoever is not everlasting is nothing." This, the cry of a fiery soul very long ago,1 had echoed and re-echoed in her mind; and though her work was incomplete, or left to be completed by another hand, --she was ready to die, ready to go through the purgatorial way leading upwards to "that blessed country where an enemy never entered, and whence a friend never went away." "2 Her young cousin Edward Guiney-of whose expected arrival from America she had written so cheerily,—reached Chipping Campden too late for her to see or recognise him. She was yet alive; but too feeble, almost, to stir or speak ; too weary, it would seem, even to think. Thus she survived for several weeks; and then at last the hour of her deliverance drew near: "Each moment of mine exile, so distinct, So vast, so bitter and so ever-during, Burns sweet before Our Lord: Love's last slow grain And all my soul foreruns her call to climb Out of this ruin." 3 She who so loved the forgotten dead,' and brought so many of the neglected back to remembrance, passed from mortal life peacefully on All Souls' Day, winged upwards by faith and the rites of her ancestral Church, out of the prison of Time into the glorious freedom of Eternity. 1 St. Augustine. Quoted by Louise Guiney, a few weeks before her death. 2 A favourite quotation of hers, from Jeremy Taylor. " "Saint Theodora on her way to the scaffold," The Martyr's Idyl," AFTERWORD "All thy old woes shall now smile on thee, All thy sorrows here shall shine, Each heavenly word by whose hid flame Both fire to us and flame to thee." CRASHAW'S" Saint Teresa." AFTERWORD THE last months of pressure, working against time, would seem to have been spent in vain; for the firm which Louise Guiney believed to have accepted the "Recusant Poets" returned the bulky manuscript soon afterwards to her colabourer, Father Geoffrey Bliss, S.J. (author of “ Manalone," a miracle play which would have made him widely popular had he lived in 1120 or even 1320 instead of 1920). But the end is not yet. Despite the brilliant vogue which was given in her youth to the singer of " The White Sail,"—despite the chaplets, the tributes, the applause and fervour evoked in America in the eighties and nineties by a girl who was compared at the same moment to a wild rose and a gallant soldier, it may be that some of the best fruits of her lifework are yet to be gathered. Daughter of one who through years of protracted suffering paid daily for his "crowded hour of glorious life," Louise Guiney, from first to last, was unwilling to recognise the meaning of the words " compromise or expediency." Let us not presume to pity her. Those who face and endure such "failure," those who carry into the region of letters the principles of honour, service, heroic love and fealty, which make the quintessence of chivalry,-from such are recruited the predestined victors, for whom "Time's old daughter Truth" holds fame in store. At Wolvercote, Oxford, at the foot of a Celtic Cross marking the grave of Louise Imogen Guiney, an American pilgrim describes how he saw no fading mass of flowers but only one single wreath of laurel. Better than laurels, however, are the winged words sent forth in her praise by a true poet from the land of her birth. |