For poetry is a matter of the mounting blood as well as the tempered mind. It has, in spite of those who have suffered the horrible disaster of physical overthrow and yet have kept on singing, something intimately dependent on the actual coursing of the blood, the beat of the physical heart. The only verse Louise Guiney prized, was the verse with wings, spontaneous as the gestures of childhood or the oriole’s song. She could knock her lines into a wild ruin and rebuild, but that was after the first swift assembling of stone on stone. Any idea of verse soberly and slowly evolved, as an intellectual feat, was afar from her. “Our best things,” she said, “are the easiest. They’re no trouble.” They did cost, in the last sweet pangs of intent consideration, of rearranging, polishing, and hunting down the best and only word. When the poetic impulse seized her, she bent to it in obedient delight. She never coaxed or beckoned. Only into the living spring did she dip her cup: no thrifty piping it to the house in forethought of the day when the frost creeps and “no birds sing.” The greatest beauties in her verse were as spontaneous as they dropped from the skies and she set them in their chaste enduring gold. Though she was so unwearied in polishing and changing, in their general scope and temper the poems came as from the hand of God, and when her own hand fell too laxly to receive them, they did not come. Her resultant loneliness of mind she accepted with a decorum due the gods who give and take away again; you might almost have called it unconcern. For she was not greedy of life: only grateful for its temperate dole. She might own, under anxious accusation, to having “no luck, no leisure, no liberty,” but that was only for the intimates who inevitably “knew.” “As to the Muse,” (this in 1916) “she has given me the go by. No matter: this dog has most hugely enjoyed his day, which was Stevenson’s day, and Lionel Johnson’s, and Herbert Clarke’s, and Philip Savage’s.”