The Little English Gallery, six biographical essays in her individual manner of a condensed bewilderment of research, holds the seed of what might be accounted her life work. For not only does her portrait pen paint you a fine enduring picture of Lady Danvers, Farquhar, Beauclerk, Langton and Hazlitt, but here also is the preface, as it might be called, of her Henry Vaughan, to whose gentle service she bent the intermittent work of later years. During that English summer of 1895, she went on pilgrimage to the grave of Vaughan, at Llansaintffread. This was a part of Wales hardly touched by tourists, for the ubiquitous motor car had not begun its devil’s business of shedding profanation over silent ways. To walk here was to withdraw as deeply as you would into the fragrance of past simplicities. Louise Guiney was reft away into a trance of inward peace. She trod the paths her poet loved, and she was, also with him, where her mind would ever be, in the seventeenth century. This was one of her ardent quests, her passionate rescues: for Vaughan was forgotten on his own familiar ground. Literally the places that had known him knew him no more. Even his grave had been desecrated by the slow attrition of neglect. A coal shed had encroached on it, coal had fallen on his stone, cans and broken glass littered the sacred spot. The two Americans, in a haste of ruth, cleared the stone with hands and walking sticks, and Louise Guiney drew to her two bent and blear-eyed Hodges working near and preached to them Vaughan, the good physician, and his right to the seemliness of an ordered resting-place. And she stayed not in her doing, but called later upon England and America for a fund to put the grave in order and suitably to commemorate the poet. The Vaughan essay, in her own copy of the Little English Gallery, grew thick with notes, confirmatory or expanded, in this browsing over Welsh ground, and the Vaughan editing ran on and on through following years into what must be the authoritative edition of his work. Why did she so love and serve him? Not only because his thoughts take hold on heaven and, like the breath of man, fly upward, that spirit of devotion—the negation of earthly desires so intoxicating to her—but because he might otherwise, as in his own elegies, “stop short of immortality.” His silent footstep seemed to have left no mark beside his darling Usk. His soul, like her own, in never questioning acceptance, perpetually sought eternity. He loved learning, and he had an “eye and ear for the green earth.” He had also a “sweet self-privacy,” and his inexhaustible delight in the created world was not impaired or qualified by his childlike love of heaven. He is temperate, he is remote. Louise Guiney would have loved to walk and laugh with him, for he was one of the few with whom she chose to dwell. To know him a little is to know her better, not so much from their likeness, but to learn what minds were dear to her.