Page:Poems Shore.djvu/229

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King Baldwin

natural kind; heroic goodness, and despairing guilt, bitter reaction, disenchantment, all the mystery and grandeur of human life and will, in its struggles with destiny.


Some, it is hoped, will be able to imagine with what a conflict of pleasure and pain these unguessed-of relics were disentombed, too late to pour forth to their author the manifold feelings they had awakened. The reader will perhaps be as much surprised as the survivor was, and as others who have seen them have been, that such work should have been cast aside by the writer as unworthy of completion.

No doubt the indifference with which she grew to regard her own verses was strengthened by her belief in their former failure to make a mark in the world. Though they had received eulogistic notices, and had interested private friends, they had not made for her such a name as to stimulate her to further efforts. "I have long known that there is no public for us," she once said calmly, in almost her last days, to her disappointed fellow-worker, who hoped and strove still, after she had ceased to do so. But she was

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