Louise Imogen Guiney

								

and answer between her and her defending saints. She anticipated
danger as little as a child. To entertain suspicion was to admit evil
company to her inviolate mind. But, from whatever delicately abstruse
causes, she wore a brave decorum of courage, a feather in the cap, a
sword of high behavior. On lonely roads she would walk unconcerned,
her mind coursing over the centuries, her whimsical smile responsive
to warnings from the more circumspect and foreboding. She was the
child of nature, the child of God; should she quake in a world which
was, though uncoveted, her inheritance? Then, as in later life, she
sometimes seemed to be walking through “worlds not realized,” “whether
in the body or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth.” And this is
no matter for wonder. Thin silvern echoes from the past were always
chiming on her inward ear, majestic syllables drew on her imaginings,
and while she dwelt on “old, unhappy, far-off things” the new wine of
her youth and the immediate loveliness of this present life mingled an
intoxicating cup. And suddenly the spell of the past would fall from
her, and she would be as irresponsibly alive to the bright beauties of
the challenging day as a dryad on holiday out of her tree.
As a girl, she was uniquely dear to the older men and women pleasurably
stirred by the literary event of her early blossoming into essays
and verse, and charmed anew, when they had found her out in her shy
fastnesses, by the unstudied simplicities of her modest behavior. Mrs.
James T. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett were hers admiringly, Mrs. Louise
Chandler Moulton, known by the affectionate brevet of Godmam, adopted
her into a special sanctity of literary and personal regard, and T. W.
Parsons hailed her as a compeer with whom he was eager to count over
the pure coin out of their scholarly acquisition. It was he who, in
some form of words not to be precisely recalled, confirmed her right
to legitimacy in a bright succession in the arts, by telling her she
was, in the genius of her, “Hazlitt’s child.” Edmund Clarence Stedman,
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Richard Watson Gilder, Henry Mills Alden, gave
her work that generous welcome the noblesse of any art have in waiting
for the acolyte bringing the cup new filled. And les jeunes, poets
or pretenders, were hers to command. There were banners waving; only
this was not in the fashion of present day acclaim when a new actor
challenges his due. These were the dark chaplets and fragrant posies
the Muses love: no canopies and red carpets and the blare of jazz.
There were individual voices, low-pitched, grave, and their verdict
holds. Time may have snowed it under and his jealous lichen sought to
eat it up, but still it holds.
In those early years she published a bit of work, anonymous but
signalized by her unique charm, and a magnate of the critical world
saluted it.
“Your praise,” she wrote him, “is a charming Cinderella slipper, and