Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/19

 everything in his handwriting," says his biographer, Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore, "and the fragment which bore—my impression is—the title of 'A Dead Love' (the clipping lacks the caption) remains to give an example of some of the work that bears the flaws of his 'prentice hand, before he used his tools with the assured skill of a master." And she quotes the strange, fanciful little sketch in full, with the comment: "To his own, and perhaps other middle-aged taste, 'A Dead Love' may seem negligible, but to those still young enough, as he himself then was, to credit passion with a potency not only to survive 'the gradual furnace of the world,' but even to blossom in the dust of graves, this stigmatization as 'Gush' will seem as unfeeling as always does to the young the dry and sapless wisdom of granddams. To them any version of the Orphic myth is tinglingly credible. Yearningly desirous that the brief flower of life may never fade, such a cry finds an echo in the very roots of their inexperienced hearts. The smouldering ardor of its style, which a chastened judgment rejected, was perhaps less faulty than its author believed it to be in later years."