Louise Imogen Guiney

								


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LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY



    BY

    ALICE BROWN



    New York

    THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

    1921



    All rights reserved

    PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

    COPYRIGHT, 1921,

    BY NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW CORPORATION.



    COPYRIGHT, 1921,

    BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.



    Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1921.



    Press of

    J. J. Little & Ives Company

    New York, U. S. A.

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
A STUDY

Louise Imogen Guiney was born in Boston on January 17, 1861, and died
at Chipping Campden, England, on November 2, 1920. Of Chipping Campden
she had, in 1913, done, in a few strokes, a beguiling little picture
comforting now to hang in the mind beside that stark record of her
death:
It is, she says, “a stone-built paradise of a village not far from
Oxford. There is an April wind blowing, and forty-three roses adorn
one cottage doorway just out of sight from here. The old collie and I
had a walk yesterday, and I dipped my stick in Shakespeare’s Avon at
Fledbury.”
This was the woman, yet not much changed in high intent and gayest
vagabondage from the girl New England—and, indeed, this western
world—uniquely loved. Still, to us, is she a figure of bright
beginnings and the swiftest road to her is that backward pathway to her
youth.
Her father, General Patrick Robert Guiney, a soldier of the Civil War,
was her exemplar and her adoration, and his death an overwhelming
grief. “My preux chevalier of a father,” she was proud to call
him, in a quick flaming up of passionate remembrance. Though he died
in her girlhood—and died of his wound, as it fed her ardent soul to
remember—she never ceased to feel a living allegiance to him. Her
plastic inner life had been molded by him, the picture her mind made
of him touched into enduring colors by the manner of his death. There
was between them that “marriage of true minds” which is more lastingly
productive than the tie of blood, and she was proud if you could
trace in her the reflex of those qualities she held highest in him:
his active patriotism, his slack hold on life, if it could be nobly
given, and a tenacity of devotion to the brave fight. Of her remoter
background she says, with a pleasing touch of swagger, a slightest
waving of the plume:
“My grandfather and great gran’, too, were ‘out’ in the ’98; and the
old man had been ‘out’ in the ’45. I hope to make his acquaintance in
the sojer-boy’s Paradise, which is my bourne, if I be good.”
In one of her earliest essays, “A Child in Camp,” she makes her bow
thus, with a pretty grace:
“Like the royal personages in the drama, I was ushered on the stage of
life, literally, ‘with flourish of trumpets.’ The Civil War was at its