mock requiem in which there is no repose. Terrible is God's gift to man of the power to grieve and to remember! More blessed seem beast and bird to whom each day is sufficient, without thought of the past or dread for the future: " Happy the vernal rout that come To their due offices to-day, And strange, if in Thy mercy's sum, I ask no triumph, ask no joy, Here in the Pit my strength shall be : Help me endure the Pit, until Thou wilt not have forgotten me." In this cry of sorely tried but unshakable faith we see the same spirit that animates Theodora in "The Martyr's Idyl,” and wins first the amazed homage and then the deep reverential love of the noble young Roman officer, whose devotion to the Christian martyr-maiden leads him to the scaffold. Louise Guiney's rendering of the heroic deaths of Saint Theodora and the Centurion will impress us the more when we remember her keen consciousness of the beauties of earth. Hers was not the temperament of the stoic, nor even of the ascetic, but the deep feeling of the high-hearted poet who sees in every perishing beauty the symbol and promise of an immortal ecstasy, a sublime delight, which shall not pass away. " This nearness to the unseen breathes rapturously through Borderlands": Through all the evening, All the virginal long evening, Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone; For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during ; 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 term 'original' is one to be used charily and with forethought," wrote the same discerning critic already quoted; "but it is one that belongs without danger of challenge to Miss Guiney's work. There is a distinct quality, 1 both of treatment and conception, that is hers alone." This verdict, pronounced eighteen years ago, has never been reversed. 1 1 Jessie B. Rittenhouse, The Younger American Poets," 1904. PART II AFTERNOON "A happy genius is a gift of Nature: it depends on the influence of the stars, say the astrologers; on the organs of the body, say the naturalists; 'tis the particular gift of Heaven, say the divines. . . . How to improve it, many books can teach us; how to obtain it, none." DRYDEN. CHAPTER IX A LITTLE ENGLISH GALLERY THE flower of art," says Henry James, " blooms only where the soil is deep." "It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature" and "it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion." 1 Such also was the feeling, the conviction, of Louise Imogen Guiney, to whom the past could never be spoken of as 'dead.' "The air is laden with vibrations of bygone voices" (she says): "the voice of Firdusi, maybe, the voice of Theocritus, or that of both strangely blended; . . . or the rude massive voices of antiquity, re-born so fully and so lately that we swear them young as youth, and sacred only to the morrow. In the parliament of the present, every man represents a constituency of the past.' "We move in the craggy country, whose echoes are never stilled. A horn blows on the hill, clear, thrilling, musical; and we call to the coming huntsman. But lo! it is only the wafted sound of Roland's horn at Roncesvalles. . . . "We have to remember sighingly that our standards of originality are relative; and the highest praise must be, not that our author is a law unto himself, but that his manner is suggestive of nothing that we can call to mind. But, meanwhile, no one critic carries the memory of all literature in his head, and no writer had ever the benefit of a coroner's inquest of all critics. . . . 1" Nathaniel Hawthorne," p. 3. |