Page:Poems Shore.djvu/60

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In Memoriam

the range of practicable things, and is not as improbable as many nearly desperate deeds which have been committed and attempted in our own age. The concluding scenes are grandly conceived, and worked out with real tragic rapidity of action. Indeed, it is not saying too much to expect that they would furnish the basis of a powerful piece for the stage. It would require a Sarah Bernhardt to do justice to the conflict in Olga's soul of love, horror, heroism, and remorse.

Our memories charged with a sense of rare poetic endowment in one whom temperament and circumstances stinted in achievement during life, her friends, with whom I am permitted to join myself] stand round her grave; and each of us must in silence recall those typical words of elegy over the "vain broken promise of unfinished lives:"

manibus date lilia plenis;—
His saltem accumulem donis, et fungar inani
Munere——
F. H.

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