When she went to England for the second time, lights were burning, just lighted then: Lionel Johnson, soon to die, William Watson, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, Nora Hopper, Katherine Tynan, Dora Sigerson, in her young beauty, (afterward married to Clement Shorter, another devoted friend of L. I. G.) and W. B. Yeats—their glittering names are many. And there was Herbert Clarke, tragic figure of non-fulfilment, without mention of whom no footnote to her life would be complete, because they were mirrors of kindred tastes and proud aloofness from the market-place. He died before he knew the heart-break of the War, and Louise Guiney wrote:
“And now his bright thwarted star is out, at least in this world where he never had his dues. . . . Thinking of him gone away is to think of what Dickens calls in Bleak House ‘the world which sets this world right.’”
Edmund Gosse, Richard Garnett, Mrs. Meynell,—the list of her friendships rivals in fulness that of her beginnings in America. And those of the first years were but the beginning. Today they are numbered “in battalions.”
Though so ardent an American, England was her spirit’s home. The odor of musty archives was as delicious in her nostrils as “hawthorn buds in May.” Half effaced inscriptions were dearer to her than whole broadsides of modern pæans to success. A crusader knight on his back in some immemorial dimness was as immediate to her soul as Apollo walking down the aisles of song. London, when she was away from it, haunted her “like a passion.” To come upon her great little picture of pre-war London makes a blessed interlude in the shrieking present. For we have gained the motor car, and the price the smiling gods exacted is that we have lost the broodingness of cities—their murmurous tranquillity. That essay, Quiet London, dated 1890, has heart-break in it, as well as beauty, for those who knew the London of old and who will see it no more. Here are the very lineaments of that great fog-soaked, rain-darkened beneficence and terror which once was London. You walk in it with her and are at home in an inherited peace.
“There is no congestion of the populace; yet the creeks and coves of that ancient sea remain brimmed with mortality, hour after hour, century after century, as if in subjection to a fixed moon. It is the very poise of energy, the aggregation of so much force that all force is at a standstill; the miraculous moment, indefinitely prolonged, when achieved fruition becalms itself at the full, and satiety hesitates to set in.”
Here is the rain-swept atmosphere:
“The hushing rain, from a windless sky, falls in sheets of silver on gray, gray on violet, violet on smouldering purple, and anon makes whole what it had hardly riven: the veil spun of nameless analogic tints, which brings up the perspective of every road, the tapestry of sun-shot mist which Théophile Gautier admired once with all his eyes. . . . At the angles of the grimiest places, choked with trade, we stumble on little old bearded graveyards, pools of ancestral sleep; or low-lying leafy gardens where monks and guildsmen have had their dream: closes inexpressibly pregnant with peace, the cæsural pauses of our loud to-day.”
In her ecstatic browsings, her rapt withdrawal into old centuries, she was the best Londoner of them all. And here is her gay tribute to English weather:
“The mannerly, vertical showers . . . fall sudden and silent, like unbidden tears, while you look forth from the wild purple coast of Ireland at the slant and tawny fishing sails, or lean against the wall of a ruined abbey in the fold of the Mendip Hills. Always at your side is this gentle, fickle, sun-shot rain, spinning itself out of an undarkened sky, and keeping the grass immortal and the roads pure of dust. You reach, before long, to a full sympathy and comprehension of what good Bishop Jeremy Taylor had before him when he drew his simile of ‘a soft slap of affectionate rain.’ It is the rain of the Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, and Hanoverians, the immemorial law-giver, and the oldest inhabitant of the isles. Wheresoever it descends, there are perpetual freshness and peace.”
To walk with her was to add day to storied day in a calendar rubricated from end to end.