Over the silvered earth, where the night rang
With a small shrillness of a smaller world,
If not a less inexorable one,
Than hers had been; and after a few steps
Made cautiously along the singing grass,
She saw the falling lawn that lay before her,
The shining path where she must not be seen,
The still trees in the moonlight, and the river.
Yes, she was surely dead before she died. Tragedies had been her secret playthings and there was nothing left, nothing but to follow her peculiar light. Like Juliet her dismal scene she must act alone. She must go—forever. But the going was not difficult, for she was dead before she died.
Truly if one lingers over this pitiable death of Gabrielle’s, protesting against a destiny that will enact such evil, there is bound to rise in one’s mind the many instances in Mr. Robinson’s poetry where the same story is told. It is in The Children of the Night that this judgment of the world found its earliest expression, thenceforward developing until it has now reached its culmination. Here, in Roman Bartholow, in the magic loveliness of Gabrielle it has come to a noble conclusion.