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INTRODUCTION

of mind. She was steadily moving towards a more perfect achievement and the poems that she wrote in the last years and before the world's trouble drew her away were finer and more assured than those she had previously written. Behind the lines of battle her spirit showed as clearly and as beautifully as it does in her poetry. A year ago the soldiers in the Chalons section were speaking of herself and her sister (two beings indeed with a single soul) as "the Saints." The Government of France recognized their devotion and the worth of their service by the decoration it gave. These sisters were like twin spirits caught into an alien sphere, strangely beautiful and strangely apart, and the heavy and unimaginable weight of the world's agony became too great for them to bear. The one who was the articulate poet has left a triumphant stanza for our thought of them—

I know that we exist,
Two entities in Time.
Our vital wills resist
Enclosing night; our thoughts
Command a Truth above
All fear, in knowing Love.

So an Iphigenia might speak in a play by an Euripides of our day.

Padraic Colum.

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