Her first book was Songs at the Start (1884) and the first collected essays Goose-Quill Papers (1885). The essays, despite a wilful archaism, an armored stiffness of light attack learned out of library shelves, are astonishingly mature for a pen so young—if by youth or age we mean the mere cumulative sum of time passed. Indeed, the author thought well enough of the scintillant little papers to include two of them, An Open Letter to the Moon, and On Teaching One’s Grandmother to Suck Eggs, in her later Patrins. You have but to love Louise Guiney to find Goose-Quill Papers a jovial self-betraying little book to recur to when you long for her whimsical face again or the cascading gamut of her laugh. It is spiced with playfulness, a learned playfulness, it must be owned, and yet, if you know her, you know also how much learning was waiting in her teeming mind, eager to get into the book and cram it, cover to cover, and you are grateful for the sense of just values that let you off so gently. For she had one of those fructifying minds which absorb like a sponge; everything they draw in breeds something else, and the two, fact and mother wit, breed again until you are swept along on a stream of rushing lineage. And over her happy selection of topics quaint and gay, her own illuminating humor plays like a thread of gold in tapestry moved lightly by a wind. We may not, of course, actually assume, so objective is she even then, that her whimsies of the first person are literally self-betraying; but they do sometimes open a window upon her as we know her, the gay relish of life that was hers, the ardor for the great game of chasing a happy fancy to its born destiny of an ultimate end, and stroking it into the gentle complaisance of the willing captive; the healthy, untrammeled revolt against bugaboos “nature itself cannot endure”—notably mathematics when she “roars you” like any lion (albeit smiling behind his whiskers as begging to remind you he has no idea of resorting to the argument of claws). When she has mounted her gaily caparisoned jennet of unforced humor, she takes the world by inversion; you shall follow her circumspectly, or her steed will throw up his heels in your face and gallop off in the dust of his own making. “My novitiate page,” she ruefully confesses, invoking the influence of Hazlitt, “smelled hard of that dear name, likewise of Browne, Taylor, and Cowley, and Lamb, and of one R. L. S., a Romany chal then utterly unknown, whom I had found in secret and in secret worshiped.” It was a brave beginning, this slender book of little essays, and it was dedicated to Oliver Wendell Holmes. How charmingly, with what engaging gallantry he must have taken it!