“Yet in the valley,
At a turn of the orchard alley,
When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air,
Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee,
Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee,
O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired! O first and final Fair!”
The line:
“Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown,”
is one of those pervasive beauties which, though in a perfect simplicity, invoke the universal that is beauty’s self. You see in it—or you fancy, for it falls on the sensitive plate of emotion that far outranks your intellect—all the faces of all the dead from the shepherd slain outside Eden past the Pharaohs and queens that “died young and fair” to him “that died o’ Wednesday.”
Happy Ending is her renewed hail and her farewell. Here are some of the old beauties and, gathered up with them, the later buds of a more sparsely blossoming fancy, snowed under time and yesterday. It is a sad book, for all its nobility; it breathes the accent of farewells. To a friend who challenged the appositeness of the title she said, smiling, it was, on the contrary, exact, for her life of verse was done. In 1917, she wrote: