nd soft-lighted wonder.
Of the green thickets of the redwood forests he says, in "Primeval
California": "A dense undergrowth of light green foliage caught and held
the sunlight like so much spray." So do Stoddard's pages catch and hold
the lights and shadows of a world which is the more beautiful because he
beheld it and sang of it--for sing he did. His prose is the essence of
poetry.

In my autograph copy of "The Footprints of the Padres" Stoddard wrote:
"A new memory of Old Monterey is the richer for our meeting here for the
first time in the flesh. We have often met in spirit ere this." Whenever
we would go walking together, he and I, through the streets of that old
Monterey, old no longer save in memory, he would invariably take me to a
certain high board fence, and looking through an opening show me the
ruins of an adobe house--nothing but a broken fireplace left, moss-grown
and crumbling away. "That is my old California," he would say, while his
sweet voice was shaken with tears. That desolated hearth seemed to him
the symbol of the California which he had known and loved.... But no,
the old California that Stoddard loved lives on, and will, because he
caught and preserved its spirit and its coloring, its light and life and
music. As the redwood thicket holds the sunlight, so do Stoddard's words
keep bright and living, though viewed through a mist of tears, the
California of other days.

In this new edition of "The Footprints" some changes will be found,
changes which all will agree make an improvement over the original
volume. "Primeval California," first published in October, 1881, in the
old Scribner's (now The Century) Magazine, when James G. Holland was its
editor, is at times Stoddard at his best. "In Yosemite Shadows" shows us
the young Stoddard full of boyish enthusiasm--he could not have been
more than twenty when it was written and published, in the old Overland,
then edited by Bret Harte. It is more than a gloriously poetic
description of Yosemite, when Yosemite still dreamed in its virgin
beauty; it is the revelation of a poet's beginnings, for it gives us in
the rough, just finding their way to the light, all those gifts which
later won Stoddard his fame.

The third addition to this volume is "An Affair of the Misty City," a
valuable chapter, since it is wholly autobiographical, and at the same
time embodies pen portraits of all the celebrities of California's first
literary days, that famous group