Louise Imogen Guiney

								

persistently light-hearted letters came to us less frequently; but
they came, unfailingly at Christmas, like gay holly sprays flung from
December to young January, as if in token of the lastingness of things.
She was so rare a creature, our common memories had been so mingled
of life and laughter, that she had become one of the certainties in a
fleeting and tumultuous world. We were stupidly used to her, as you are
used to sunrise or a star. Then without warning the news came, and the
word went from lip to hushed lip: “Lou Guiney is dead.” That was the
name, Lou Guiney, as it had been in the day of her youth. And at once
we became poignantly alive to her with a more sensitive appreciation,
a new awareness. We turned renewedly to her work and found in it a
more quickly breathing presence. We had been recalled, in a shock of
haste, to crown it before our own hands should be too lax to lift the
heaviness of laurel. So it was that she seemed to have stepped at once
into that porch of continued being which is the house of an immortality
of love and praise, the only thing the world has really to offer the
spirits of its dead.
To recall the form and color of her youth is the eager task likely to
give her oldest friends their first imperfect solace. For it is the
pathetic human instinct to catch at the mantle of time past, as if
to assure itself of something in the web of life that holds. Those
who knew her at twenty and thirty need not err widely in their guess
at her at fifteen. For being one of that gay fellowship for whom “a
star danced” and who buoyantly refuse infection from the “hungry
generations” that “tread” us “down,” she stayed, in every sense, except
that of the disciplined mind and an acquired patience of the heart,
unaffectedly young. Age, the age of mere years, brutal to attack and
vanquish, could never, even in his ultimate assaults, if they had been
permitted him, have withered her bright fecundities of speech and
glance. For there is something in a certain quality of youth that will
not be downed. It is the livingness of a mind refreshed at wells of
immortalities. Of outward vain pretense—the affectation of a persisting
juvenility—it is divinely innocent. You could hardly imagine her, at
any age, without her girl’s grace, her mystic smile. A long-legged romp
in petticoats far beyond the milestones when childhood is apt to slink
away abashed before oncoming desires and dignities, she was early in
love with the sweet seclusion of books and equally with gay adventure
out of doors. The fields, on a day of spring, the river under skies
dull or bright, were her abiding joys. Her “winding Charles” was the
young navigator’s track to seas of pleasure. She



    “could not have enough of this sweet world.”
Those who knew her soon enough to play with her the duplex game of
bodily delight and mental inebriety, remember hours so near the wild