Nothing rewards her more indubitably than the discovery of even a quasi-lineage, a shadow of likeness not to be developed into the actual relationship supported by time and place. She does not often floor you with unimpeachability of dates, but she knows the very complexion of her time, “his form and color.” She remembers what wings beat the air of fortunate decades, dropping pinions more than one imitator snatched in falling and wore brazenly in his cap. She can rehearse the unbroken descent of metres. Her parallel between Mangan and Poe, their dependence on the haunting adjunct of the refrain, does revolve about chronology; but chiefly she relies upon the convictions of her divining mind. She compares the “neck and neck achievements of Mangan and Poe.” She traces both back to the colossus Coleridge, with his wells of color. His was the spring of youth, and they bore away full flagons. It is hardly possible to overrate her value to the student of literature in these learned but uncharted flights all over the visible sky of the periods where her subjects moved. Literature, she knows, is a species of royal descent. The Titans may not live to see the faces of their own children, yet out of those rich fecundities of authentic utterance children are born and show trace of august lineage. And it is hers, the “abstract and brief chronicler” of values, to find it. To Louise Guiney, there were two transcending realities: poetry and what men call, with varying accent, religion. She believed in poetry as, in the old sense, an ecstasy. She loved archaic phrases and grieved because fit words should perish, mourning them as men would mourn if, believing there were children of immortal lineage among them, they discovered these could die. To her there were archetypes of beauty, the living heavenly substance we have, with an unshaken prescience, learned to call undying. Wandering evanescences, we persuade them down to us or snatch at them and cage them in our heavier atmosphere with the hope, sometimes bewilderingly justified, of their singing on and on. One condition of our even hearing the beat of those wings bending their swallow flight to the responsive mind, is the high vibration in ourselves, the intense activity of what we call imagination. And this vibration is so often the effervescence of youth, the overplus of a richness of physical life—the speed of the blood, a quick sensibility of the brain—that after the pulse slows and the brain responds less eagerly the poet sings no more; or he clouds his verse with moralities and loads it with the stiff embroidery of intellectual conceits. Louise Guiney’s singing life was not long, because, after the impulse, in its first capricious spontaneity, had left her, she did not urge it back again. It would have been impossible for her, at any period, to select desirable subjects for poetry as the landscape painter marks a lovely spot in his mind’s eye, to return with tubes and brush. Once she did