Page:Poems Shore.djvu/58

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In Memoriam

even such a mournful dirge as this, inasmuch as it ends with these inspiring words:

Pray for all souls that mourn their Dead,
Pray for all souls that they may see
A light from the great time to be
Already streak the East with red;

Behind whose twilight wait unseen
A perfect earth, perfected man,
To finish all that we began,
To be what we would fain have been.

This indeed was her constant thought. Her most sombre visions ever saw the east streaked with red.

I have left myself small space to dwell on the poems and fragments now first published in this volume; but they will answer for themselves. The unfinished dramas cannot but awaken regrets that they should remain fragments. It is evidently not that imagination was failing but that the author's own views of poetic perfection were in constant development. The scheme of "Pedro the Cruel" was a fine one—the struggles of a nature of generous instincts and violent temperament subdued by the love of a noble-

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