My God who hast forgotten me!—
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