In what niche shall we set her statue of renown? She has done the most authentic and exquisite verse America has yet produced. Is it not rather to its honor and our defeated fame that no widespread recognition of it could have been predicted? Is Hazlitt largely read? Does Charles Lamb sell by the million or the seventeenth century lyrists by the hundred thousand? Louise Guiney was, like so much that is austerely beautiful in the modern world, a victim of majorities. The democracy of taste and intellect is perhaps the master, perhaps the puppet, of this ironic time. But the time itself has its martyrs in these children of illustrious line who cannot, sadly willing as they may be, quite speak the common tongue. It is the suffrages of the purchasing majority that determine what publishers shall print. And for us,—Diana’s chariot in the heavens means less to us than a limousine on earth. But the gods who endowed Louise Guiney with something ineffable out of their treasury alone know about these things. Under their eyes stands her slender last collection among its peers. And the book itself says: “Unto the One aware from everlasting Dear are the winners: thou art more than they.” End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Louise Imogen Guiney, by Alice Brown