“Let claws of lightning clutch me From summer’s groaning cloud, Or ever malice touch me, And glory make me proud. Oh, give my youth, my faith, my sword, Choice of the heart’s desire: A short life in the saddle, Lord! Not long life by the fire.” You find admonishing whispers from a mind grown expert in counsel: “Take Temperance to thy breast, While yet is the hour of choosing, As arbitress exquisite Of all that shall thee betide; For better than fortune’s best Is mastery in the using, And sweeter than anything sweet The art to lay it aside.” Here is the reflective, the scholastic, penetrating the hall of song and hushing more abounding measures to its own consecrating uses. She was in love, not with death as it was the poetic fashion to be in a past era of creative minds, but with gentle withdrawals, fine appreciations of ultimate values, cloistral consecrations. Her steady hand on the reins of her horses of the sun, they took the heavenly track of world-old orbits, not galloping at will, now high, now low, from sunrise to the evening star. And this not because she feared, like Icarus, to fall, but that she was perpetually referring beauty to its archetype; she had, to paraphrase her own words, “eternity in mind.” “Waiting on Him who knows us and our need, Most need have we to dare not, nor desire, But as He giveth, softly to suspire Against his gift with no inglorious greed, For this is joy, though still our joys recede.”