How the “swish of sickles” conveys their very sound! This ability to put into certain words both the music and the picture distinguishes Miss Guiney. In her sonnet upon the “Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford,” even the names that would seem to suggest an inartistic enumeration are made to convey the sense of sabbatical sweetness and calm and to visualize the scene. _The Sonnets Written at Oxford_ mark, as a whole, her finest work in this form, although the twelve London sonnets are full of strong lines and images, and several of them, such as “Doves” and “In The Docks,” take swift hold upon one’s sympathy. The former flashes a picture at the close, by way of rebuke to the over-solicitous mood, which is not only charming from the artistic side, but opens the eyes in sudden content and gladness. Ah, if man’s boast, and man’s advance be vain, And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home, And the lone Tree foreknow it, and the Dome, The monstrous island of the middle main; If each inheritor must sink again Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam— I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain. What folly lies in forecasts and in fears! Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune, Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul’s Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon, And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls. “God keeps,” I said, “our little flock of years.” This note of spiritual assurance appears throughout Miss Guiney’s work, speaking in her sonnet, “The Acknowledgment,” and again and again in other poems. She has the mystic’s passion for the One Good, the One Beauty— O hidden, O perfect, O desired, the first and the final fair!— and gives it impassioned expression in the lines, “Deo Optimo Maximo,” All else for use, one only for desire; Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee: Up from the best, whereof no man need tire, Impel Thou me. Delight is menace, if Thou brood not by, Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer. Oft as the morn, (though none of earth deny These three are dear,) Wash me of them, that I may be renewed, Nor wall in clay mine agonies and joys; O close my hand upon Beatitude! Not on her toys. And here at the last is the tenderest Nativity song for which dedicated words were ever found; so quaint, so gentle, so reverent, so blended of sweet and sad. The second stanza is an artist’s grouping from life: The Ox he openeth wide the doore And from the snowe he calls her inne, And he hath seen her Smile therefore, Our Lady without sinne. Now soone from sleepe A starre shall leap, And soon arrive both King and Hinde; _Amen_, _Amen_: But O, the place co’d I but find!