“And I said: ‘Ye have bereaven The song-thrush and the bee, And the fisher-boy at sea Of his sea-mark in the even; And gourds of cooling shade, to lie Within the sickle’s sound; And the old sheep-dog’s loyal eye Of sleep on duty’s ground; And poets of their tent And quiet tenement. Ah, impious! who so paid Such fatherhood, and made Of murmurous immortality a cargo and a trade.’ “For the hewn oak, a century fair, A wound in earth, an ache in air.” But the actual crown of the book is in the two stanzas called Borderlands. Within the small circle of recurrent rhythm this poem holds the ineffable. It is a softly drawn and haunting melody on the night wind of our thoughts, it hints at the nameless ecstasies that may be of the rhythm of the body or the soul—but we know not!—it is of the texture of the veil between sense and the unapprehended spirit. “Through all the evening, All the virginal long evening, Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone; For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during; And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring, Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown? “Yet in the valley, At a turn of the orchard alley, When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air, Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee, Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee, O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired! O first and final Fair!” The line: “Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown,” is one of those pervasive beauties which, though in a perfect simplicity, invoke the universal that is beauty’s self. You see in it—or you fancy, for it falls on the sensitive plate of emotion that far outranks your intellect—all the faces of all the dead from the shepherd slain outside Eden past the Pharaohs and queens that “died young and fair” to him “that died o’ Wednesday.” Happy Ending is her renewed hail and her farewell. Here are some of the old beauties and, gathered up with them, the later buds of a more sparsely blossoming fancy, snowed under time and yesterday. It is a sad book, for all its nobility; it breathes the accent of farewells. To a friend who challenged the appositeness of the title she said, smiling, it was, on the contrary, exact, for her life of verse was done. In 1917, she wrote: “The Muse, base baggage that she is, fled long ago. (I knew what I was up to when I called it Happy Ending.)”