Louise Imogen Guiney

								

here’s my shy foot to fit it.”
To rehearse the names that were her sponsors at this entrance into
recognition would give you a brilliant list, with hardly a gap, of
the intellectuals of some thirty to thirty-five years gone. In her
simplicity of response to this rare quality of praise, her genius of
fancy and acquisition flowing, like a magic ichor, through the veins of
her artless Americanism, there was something as new as it was piquing.
She belonged to the “dewy beginnings” of a fresh decade of literature,
a phase authoritative and unique. If her head was not turned by the
response she got to the fine timidities of her first achievement, it
was because that symmetrical treasury of perfectly classified fact
and fancy was permanently set, eyes to the past, where dwell the
ever-living forerunners of literary glories, the authentic names that
are “eternal blazon,” the exemplar and despair of lesser men. She was
timid, not before the contemporary critic, but the great witnesses
of all time—simply, and in her reverent mind tremulously, a child of
promise, heir to those old authentic glories, but not presuming on that
lineage. Tremendously believed in, she trod her earth lightly, yet
becomingly, and carried her full cup with steady hands. No taint of
ambition was in her, no trace of the base alloy of prize-getting and
wearing. She had seen the “cloud capp’d towers” of the halls of light
where the blessed everlastingly dwell, she had guessed at the shades
and green valleys, the refuge of those “ordained to fail,” and she knew
thus early, through reverent intuition, that “it has become almost an
honor not to be crowned.” Even then at the beginning, when chaplets
were being woven for her, she might have written that later recital of
her secular creed:



    “To fear not possible failure

     Nor covet the game at all.”
At that time the game was in her hands: the game of youth and gayety
and a blameless resolve to make the most of it all in the only way the
great unseen censors, the Fates that spin and weave, allow.
She was a goodly picture of girlhood, Diana not so likely to be
enamoured of Endymion as sandalled for the chase. Not tall, yet
long-legged enough to give her advantage on the road or the English
downs, she had a free grace of movement, untrammeled by the awkwardness
of fear. Even so early, she was slightly deaf, and one of her prettiest
individual poses—yet how unstudied!—was, standing, bent slightly
forward like Atalanta ready for the race, the rounded cup of her palm
behind her ear, beseeching almost whimsically in the low voice that
was half whisper without its sibilance: “Please!” Her misfortune was
not a blemish; she made it a grace. Over that and the drawback of eyes
ineffectual without the help of glasses she never wasted a breath
of impatience: she adopted instead a humorous acceptance of these