There is a light-heartedness, too, about the poem, like burnished
fringes on a mourning robe. For youth is in it as well as sorrow. Her
lamentation can break into the iridescent foam of a stanza like this,
where she pre-figures the living spirit of Tusitala absorbed into the
island life he loved and blossoming from it forever:
“There on summer’s holy hills
In illumined calms,
Smile of Tusitala thrills
Through a thousand palms;
There in a rapture breaks
Dawn on the seas,
When Tusitala from his shoon unbinds the Pleiades.”
Who could spare that outburst of young extravagance at the end?
It was she who, in the first shock of the news, when the wondering word
went from lip to lip, “Stevenson is dead!”—as if long apprehension
could never have prepared us for a calamity so amazing—said to those at
one with her in Stevenson worship:
“Let us wear a band of crêpe.”
And they did, this group of mourning followers.
The complete bibliography of her work would include introductions,
studies, notes, all characterized by her unhastened scrutiny of
“passionate yesterdays”: Matthew Arnold, Robert Emmet, Katherine
Philips, Thomas Stanley, Lionel Johnson, Edmund Campion,—these were
a few of those whose memory she illumined and clarified. No estimate
could overrate her continuing and exhaustless patience; she was content
with nothing less than living within arm’s length of all the centuries.
Poet first, poet in feeling always, even after the rude circumstance
of life had closed her singing lips, she was an undaunted craftsman at
prose. It is true she did expect too much of us. She did, especially in
those later days, more than half believe we could delight in pouncing,
with her own triumphant agility, on discoveries of remote relationships
and evasive dates. Her multiplicity of detail had become so minute
and comprehensive, especially as touching the Restoration, that even
literary journals could seldom print her with any chance of backing
from the average reader. It was inevitable to her to run on into the
merely accurate data prized by the historian and genealogist alone.
Who can expect the modern spirit, prey to one sociological germ after
another, to find antidote in the obscurities of seventeenth century
English? Yet she never veered from the natal bent of her trained mind.
Still was she the indomitable knight errant of letters. She had to go
on rescuing though the damsels she delivered died on her hands. Where
did her anxiety of pains find its limit? not with the printing: there
she had always striven untiringly for perfection of form, unblemished
accuracy. One remembers exhaustive talks with her on the subtleties
of punctuation. The Wye Valley, the Devon lanes, were vocal, in that
summer of 1895, with precepts of typography. The colon especially
engaged the attention of these perfervid artisans. Was it not, this
capricious and yet most responsive of all marks of punctuation, widely
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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