The additions of this later period are slightly more involved, much more austere. The world does not call to her now in the manifold voices of that vernal time when she and her dog went field-faring. It is a spot, though still dearly loved, to leave. In Beati Mortui she celebrates the “dead in spirit” who, having renounced the trappings of a delusive day, are henceforth like angel visitants in a world where they hold no foot of vain desire. The sonnet “Astræa,” her actual farewell, has the poignant sestette: “Are ye unwise who would not let me love you? Or must too bold desires be quieted? Only to ease you, never to reprove you, I will go back to heaven with heart unfed: Yet sisterly I turn, I bend above you, To kiss (ah, with what sorrow!) all my dead.” Next to the Golden City of belief she had, as she began, continued to love poetry, the making of it, the “love of lovely words.” And though an initiate world had hailed her, when, like a young shepherd wandered into town, a bewildering “strayed reveller,” she came “singing along the way,” man had been finding out many inventions and kept no ear for strains out of Arcady or long notes prophetically echoed from the New Jerusalem. He was laying the foundations of a taste which was to flower in jazz and the movies and the whirling of wheels on great white ways. She had her own small public always. To these, her books were cool colonnades with the sea at the end. But she had learned, now with no shadow of doubt, that there would never be any wider response from the world of the printed word. She was not, in the modern sense, “magazinable.” Editors were not laying up treasure in the safety deposits of the immortalities; they were nursing their subscription lists. If she had kept on singing, it would have been into that silence whence the poet’s voice echoes back to him with a loneliness terrifying to hear. Need that dull his fancy and mute his tongue? Not in youth, perhaps. When the blood flows boundingly, you write your verses on green leaves, so they are written, and if nobody wants the woven chaplet of them, you laugh and cast it on the stream. Through the middle years it is different. You must be quickened by an unquenchable self-belief or warmed at the fire of men’s responsive sympathy to write at all. There is something in the hurt an unheeding world can deal you that, besides draining the wounded heart, stiffens the brain and hand. And Atalanta’s pace may be slackened by the misadventures of the way. Her sandal may come loose, or she slips on a pebble and strains the tendon of that flying foot.