Page:Poems Shore.djvu/56

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In Memoriam

constant and most marked is an air of sustained fellowship with a company of imagined beings in an ideal world of larger mould and loftier souls. A true poet who is also a fine critic has called poetry the "criticism of life," and he has even gone on to say "that the strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry." The dominant and absorbing idea of Louisa Shore in poetry was to treat it as a school for the great problems of life—to hold on to the heroic, to the religious, in poetry—religious, be it said, in a human, not in a theological sense.

She reached her highest mark, I think, in the third and final part of the poem called Elegies, embodying her life-long memory of the sister and the brother lost in her earlier years. These noble verses have thought, passion, fancy, and music. I speak of the lines beginning—

Vain broken promise of unfinished lives!

and which end—

Forget not the Forgotten and Unknown.

These truly grand lines were inspired by the

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