e scene shifts to the coast
and the tang of the story turns Gaelic and unreal. Was it thus, I
wonder, always to the imagination of William Sharp, Lowland life real,
Highland life mystical?

Sharp was handicapped, of course, in coming to the subject material he
could best handle late in life, "Pharais" (1894) and "The Mountain
Lovers" (1895), the first books published as by "F.M.," being just as
definitely 'prenticework in their kind as was "Children of To-morrow"
(1890) in its kind. Of the long stories other than "Children of
To-morrow" published in his own name, "A Fellowe and his Wife" (1892)
and "Wives in Exile" (1896) have no very serious intention, though both
are well done after their kind, records of imaginings, respectively of
experiences of art life in Rome, and of yachting experiences in the
Irish Sea. It was not until "Silence Farm" (1899), as I have said, that,
as William Sharp, he found himself.

"The Gypsy Christ" (1896), which might well have been developed into a
full-fledged romance, is less original than any of his longer writings.
It is, like "The Weird of Michael Scott" and "A Northern Night," closely
allied to essays of his other role, that of "F.M.," to catch and express
"the tempestuous loveliness of terror," such as the catastrophe of "The
Mountain Lovers," "The Barbaric Tales," and those short stories in which
Gloom Achanna is hero-villain. It is in such work that Sharp shows his
affinities to Poe, affinities which are not elsewhere as obvious as his
affinities to De Quincey. Narrative was not native to De Quincey any
more than it was to Sharp, though Sharp was led toward it by his
interest in character, an interest that was not in any large measure
given to De Quincey, who, when he turned to narrative other than that
which relates what had happened to him or what he had dreamed had
happened to him, makes the reader feel he did so as a concession to the
public. Another interest that was Sharp's, an interest amounting to a
passion,--out-of-doors,--De Quincey had not at all, for all his devotion
to Wordsworth and to Wordsworth's interests. Like De Quincey, on the
other hand, Sharp delights in "fine writing," in both senses of the
phrase, in the "highfalutin" that is objectionable, and in the ornately
beautiful that is one fitting expression of romantic thought. Both men
preferred the mouth-filling word to the simple one, the Latinical
adjective to the Saxon; both had rather see visions and dream