Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/235

GUY WETMORE CARRYL the most buoyant nature possible. It could scarcely have been otherwise, with his unique facility and irrepressible zest in life.

Life must have seemed very fair to him, as he himself seemed to others, when I first knew him in his student days. He did everything with a happy ease, and was apparently without a care. Handsome, healthy, debonair,—a youth in years and bearing, a man in his accomplishments,—he surely was Fortune's favorite. I remember his many graces, and the sparkling quality of the plays that he wrote, and that proved so apt when enacted by fellow-students or by the associations for which some of them were cast. With all his relish for life, he was steadfastly ambitious, and the reverse of an idler devoted to pleasures everywhere within his reach. Still, in the strength of his youth, he seemed quite equal to either experience or work, and likely to take his fill of both.

This he succeeded in doing, as a poet, an observer, a journalist, a novelist, a man in touch with his comrades and the world. The present collection embraces the poems which he had begun to arrange, substantially as here given, and which may be considered expressive of his most elevated moods. They were the overflow of a talent that was largely occupied with lighter work, or, most of all, in the prose fiction by which he gained, and was increasing, his hold upon public favor. In the thought of all that might have been the outcome of after years, I am moved by the pity of their denial. As it is, the hands of his elders set the lamp on the stone that bears his name,—a [221]