Though the last years of her middle age were the less robust, as to the intellectual life she had no waning. Her mind was no less keen nor, except in the sudden exhaustion of a tragic illness, were her activities dulled. She died young. And though the heart that is the bravado of sheer courage was never allowed to fail her, the bodily heart did fail. Those who had walked with her knew its weakness, and that, a race-horse on the road, she was speedily exhausted in a climb. One day, lost on Exmoor, her walking mate, looking back for her, would find the world empty of her altogether. Knowing the sort of spirit she was, it was easy to guess the Little People had kidnapped her or an archangel hidden her in the brightness of his wings while they discoursed together on topics of the upper sky. But the heather had simply closed over her; she had lain down to rest her tired heart. And as the physical world, out of the strange jealousy of its predestined enmities, is forever fighting the spirit, so the feebler action of a weakening heart might dull those swift spontaneities that are man’s answer to the beauty of things—his protest to the earth that cajoles and challenges the while it fulfils its mysterious hostility and overthrows him in the end. In her prose work of editing and reviewing, the blade was sharper as time wore upon it and she grew more recondite in knowledge and more desperately exact, omitting no extreme of patient scrutiny. But poetry was her youth, and youth was gone. And youth is not a matter of years. It is what the years have done to us. If we may borrow a tag of appreciation for her verse, we could hardly do better than quote her resumé of Hurrell Froude’s, the “clearness, simplicity, orderly thought and noble severity” she found in him. His poems “have a strong singleness and sad transparency, the tone of them a little chilly, yet almost Virgilian, and arrestingly beautiful; . . . abstinent, concentrated, true.” Now primarily Froude’s verse is not in the least like Louise Guiney’s. It is scarcely more than the first note leading up the scale. In the amazed apprehension of beauty, he is leagues behind her. Yet the “almost Virgilian” of her comment fits her to perfection. And if she is not always “clear” she is, marvelously again, “a little chilly,” with the chill of spring twilights when earth scents are in the air, the lily-of-the-valley just bloomed out of the cold, or the damp richness of the April woods.