One remembers her climbing the slope, blue with wild hyacinths, at Haughmond Abbey, or taking the straight “seven long miles” across Egdon Heath, the sun darkened in a livid sky and floods of rain to follow before the wayfarers found refuge in the little church where D’Urbervilles lie, significant in nothing now save an envious immortality on Thomas Hardy’s page. The clouds in that thunderous sky were piled into imperial semblances, Emperors of old Rome, and out of their brief pageant sprang Louise Guiney’s poem of Romans in Dorset, the first three stanzas as illuminative as the sun and dark that ruled the air: “A stupor on the heath, And wrath along the sky; Space everywhere; beneath A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon on high. “Sullen quiet below, But storm in upper air! A wind from long ago, In mouldy chambers of the cloud had ripped an arras there, “And singed the triple gloom, And let through, in a flame, Crowned faces of old Rome: Regnant o’er Rome’s abandoned ground, processional they came.” One remembers her, a last rite before leaving England, not knowing she should return, feeding the doves in Paul’s Churchyard and, again at Shrewsbury, packing, among dear mementoes, a sod of English earth. To speak of her letters, those floating immortalities she cast about with so prodigal a hand, is to wonder anew at an imaginative brilliancy even beyond what she put into her considered work. To open one was an event. Almost you were miserly over the envelope itself, and treasured it, the script on it was of so rare a beauty. For her handwriting had an individual distinction. Done in haste or at leisure, it was the same. Her tumultuous jottings on margins of print or bits of scribbling paper kept the line of grace. And the subject matter! it was as varied as flowers and jewels and shells. In some cases, her books may have suffered from too anxious a care. Her affluent learning, deeply as it enriched her poetic gift, may have done something toward choking it, burying it under the drift of yesterdays. For having at her memory’s call the immortal lines of our English tongue, a despair may well have overtaken her with the impulse to enter that great company. She lacked the crude yet wholesome audacity of those to whom the world is young. But if her considered work may possibly have suffered from “much cherishing,” her letters made their bright advent unhindered. In them she lost her sense of studious responsibilities and—strange paradox of time!—it is they who may go farthest toward making her immortal. She was simply not self-conscious about them, and the haste with which they left her hand for the post was what saved them in their living delightfulness. And they were plentiful as leaves in Arden. Never did she let her correspondence “come tardy off.” Courteous, good-natured, ever the prey of bores and sympathetic