There in a rapture breaks
Dawn on the seas,
When Tusitala from his shoon unbinds the Pleiades.”
Who could spare that outburst of young extravagance at the end?
It was she who, in the first shock of the news, when the wondering word went from lip to lip, “Stevenson is dead!”—as if long apprehension could never have prepared us for a calamity so amazing—said to those at one with her in Stevenson worship:
“Let us wear a band of crêpe.”
And they did, this group of mourning followers.
The complete bibliography of her work would include introductions, studies, notes, all characterized by her unhastened scrutiny of “passionate yesterdays”: Matthew Arnold, Robert Emmet, Katherine Philips, Thomas Stanley, Lionel Johnson, Edmund Campion,—these were a few of those whose memory she illumined and clarified. No estimate could overrate her continuing and exhaustless patience; she was content with nothing less than living within arm’s length of all the centuries. Poet first, poet in feeling always, even after the rude circumstance of life had closed her singing lips, she was an undaunted craftsman at prose. It is true she did expect too much of us. She did, especially in those later days, more than half believe we could delight in pouncing, with her own triumphant agility, on discoveries of remote relationships and evasive dates. Her multiplicity of detail had become so minute and comprehensive, especially as touching the Restoration, that even literary journals could seldom print her with any chance of backing from the average reader. It was inevitable to her to run on into the merely accurate data prized by the historian and genealogist alone. Who can expect the modern spirit, prey to one sociological germ after another, to find antidote in the obscurities of seventeenth century English? Yet she never veered from the natal bent of her trained mind. Still was she the indomitable knight errant of letters. She had to go on rescuing though the damsels she delivered died on her hands. Where did her anxiety of pains find its limit? not with the printing: there she had always striven untiringly for perfection of form, unblemished accuracy. One remembers exhaustive talks with her on the subtleties of punctuation. The Wye Valley, the Devon lanes, were vocal, in that summer of 1895, with precepts of typography. The colon especially engaged the attention of these perfervid artisans. Was it not, this capricious and yet most responsive of all marks of punctuation, widely neglected in its supremest subtlety? Something of this argumentation was afterward echoed in her paper on Lionel Johnson:
“Nothing was trivial to this ‘enamoured architect’ of perfection. He cultivated a half mischievous attachment to certain antique forms of spelling, and to the colon, which our slovenly press will have none of; and because the colon stands for fine differentiations and sly sequences, he delighted especially to employ it.”