Louise Imogen Guiney

								




    “Thought’s self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb,

    And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam:

    Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our pursuing.



    “A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle,

    A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty:

    We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.



    “(I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses

    All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,

    All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.)



    “We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the storm-wind;

    We leap to the infinite dark, like sparks from the anvil.

    Thou leadest, O God! All’s well with Thy troopers that follow.”
In The Roadside Harp (1893) (and this she calls, as late as 1911, “my
best book”) she is in full swing of that individual color and form
of verse that were hers thenceforth, hall-marked, inimitable, of a
delicate yet imperishable fragility of loveliness, unique as the hand
they were written in. Here sounds her own true note. Here were more
plainly distinguishable the defined colors of the braided strands of
destiny that made her so rare a nature and were perhaps—it is well to
put it softly, this question—to hinder her in robustness and variety of
performance. Irish by birth, she had not to the full, what she finds
in Mangan, that “racial luxuriance and fluency.” And, like him, her
“genius is happier on Saxon than on Celtic ground.” She was too subject
to varied impulses to be the exponent of one. Her love in letters ran
passionately to the Anglo-Saxon; the seventeenth century was her home.
She was devoutly Catholic, yet living fibres in her knew the earth as
it was in its unsymbolized freshness before the Great Deliverer came.
“You are a natural Christian,” she wrote once to a friend poor in the
consolations of belief, “with a birthright of gladness and peace,
whether you seize it or not; whereas I am the other fellow, a bed-rock
pagan, never able to live up to the inestimable spiritual conditions to
which I was born.”
This was humility only, no wavering from her transcending faith. Yet
the wholesome natural man in her was acutely sensitive to that earth
which saw the immortal gods. You find her listening, responsive, to
the far heard echoes of Greek harmony. She was ready with her cock to
Æsculapius, the tribute of her gentle allegiance to those kingly pagans
who loved the light of the sun and shrank from the “dishonor of the
grave,” who knew the face of Nemesis and were, above all, disciples of
the law of Aidôs, the negation of excess. In the rich exposition of
Gilbert Murray:
“Aidôs implies that, from some subtle emotion inside you, some ruth or
shame or reflection, some feeling perhaps of the comparative smallness
of your own rights and wrongs in the presence of the great things of
the world, the gods and men’s souls and the portals of life and death,