[Illustration] LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY BY ALICE BROWN New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1921 _All rights reserved_ PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW CORPORATION. COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1921. Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY A STUDY Louise Imogen Guiney was born in Boston on January 17, 1861, and died at Chipping Campden, England, on November 2, 1920. Of Chipping Campden she had, in 1913, done, in a few strokes, a beguiling little picture comforting now to hang in the mind beside that stark record of her death: It is, she says, “a stone-built paradise of a village not far from Oxford. There is an April wind blowing, and forty-three roses adorn one cottage doorway just out of sight from here. The old collie and I had a walk yesterday, and I dipped my stick in Shakespeare’s Avon at Fledbury.” This was the woman, yet not much changed in high intent and gayest vagabondage from the girl New England—and, indeed, this western world—uniquely loved. Still, to us, is she a figure of bright beginnings and the swiftest road to her is that backward pathway to her youth. Her father, General Patrick Robert Guiney, a soldier of the Civil War, was her exemplar and her adoration, and his death an overwhelming grief. “My _preux chevalier_ of a father,” she was proud to call him, in a quick flaming up of passionate remembrance. Though he died in her girlhood—and died of his wound, as it fed her ardent soul to remember—she never ceased to feel a living allegiance to him. Her plastic inner life had been molded by him, the picture her mind made of him touched into enduring colors by the manner of his death. There was between them that “marriage of true minds” which is more lastingly productive than the tie of blood, and she was proud if you could trace in her the reflex of those qualities she held highest in him: his active patriotism, his slack hold on life, if it could be nobly given, and a tenacity of devotion to the brave fight. Of her remoter background she says, with a pleasing touch of swagger, a slightest waving of the plume: “My grandfather and great gran’, too, were ‘out’ in the ’98; and the old man had been ‘out’ in the ’45. I hope to make his acquaintance in the sojer-boy’s Paradise, which is my bourne, if I be good.” In one of her earliest essays, “A Child in Camp,” she makes her bow thus, with a pretty grace: “Like the royal personages in the drama, I was ushered on the stage of life, literally, ‘with flourish of trumpets.’ The Civil War was at its bursting point, the President calling for recruits: it was impertinent of me, but in that solemn hour I came a-crowing into the world. And since I was born under allegiance, a lady whom I learned to love with incredible quickness, ‘O bella Libertà! O bella!’