articulates the cry which life wrings at sometime from each of us, noting the infinite solicitude that writes self-executing laws in the hearts of the creatures, while man goes blundering after intimations and dreams. One comes at times face to face with the necessity to justify the ways of God to man, when he notes throughout nature the unerring certainty of instinct, and the stumbling fallibility of reason. He questions why the bee excels him in wisdom and force and persistence, in shaping conditions for its maintenance, and in intuitions of destiny; or why the infinite exactness that established the goings of the ant in the devious ways of her endeavor should have left man to follow so fatuous a gleam as human intuition in finding his own foot-path among the tortuous ways of life. And these queries Miss Guiney’s poem raises, though not with arraignment, rather with the logical demand: As to a weed, to me but give Thy sap! lest aye inoperative Here in the Pit my strength shall be: And still, Help me endure the Pit until Thou wilt not have forgotten me. There is sinew and brawn in Miss Guiney’s work; she is not dallying in the scented gardens of poesy, but entering the tourney in valorous emprise. Not a man of them who can meet fate in a braver joust than she, and he must needs look well to his armor if he come off as unscathed. She never stops to bewail the prick of the spear, though it draw blood, but enters the field again for the “Hope not compassed, and yet not void.” There is tonic in her work for the craven heart, a note to shame one back to the ranks. Each is a “Recruit” and should take to himself this marching order: So much to me is imminent: To leave Revolt that is my tent, And Failure, chosen for my bride, And into life’s highway be gone Ere yet Creation marches on, Obedient, jocund, glorified: And, last of things afoot, to know How to be free is still to go With glad concession, grave accord, Nor longer, bond and imbecile, Stand out against the Gradual Will, The guessed ‘Fall in’! of God the Lord. And the plea of Saint George, awaiting the hour to essay his quest, O give my youth, my faith, my sword, Choice of the heart’s desire: A short life in the saddle, Lord! Not long life by the fire,— sets one’s sluggish blood in responsive motion,—as do the succeeding lines: I fear no breathing bowman, But only, east and west, The awful other foeman Impowered in my breast. The outer fray in the sun shall be, The inner beneath the moon; And may Our Lady lend to me Sight of the dragon soon. At the outset of her work Miss Guiney sang an electrifying song of which men begrudged her the glory, being theft of Jove’s thunder. It was hight valiantly “The Wild Ride,” and has the spirit of all the knights and troopers in Christendom packed within its tense and vibrant lines: