, but never to
be touched again.

It is unnecessary to follow Mr. Stoddart through a long and happy life
of angling and of literary leisure. He only blossomed once. His poem
was plagiarised and inserted in _Graham's Magazine_, by a person named
Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro (vol. xx.). Mr. Ingram, the biographer of
Edgar Poe, observes that Poe praised the piece while he was exposing
Tasistro's "barefaced robbery."

The copy of _The Death-Wake_ from which this edition is printed was
once the property of Mr. Aytoun, author of _Lays of the Scottish
Cavaliers_, and, I presume, of _Ta Phairshon_. Mr. Aytoun has written
a prefatory sonnet which will be found in its proper place, a set of
rhymes on the flyleaf at the end, and various cheerful but unfeeling
notes. After some hesitation I do not print these frivolities.

The copy was most generously presented to me by Professor Knight of
St. Andrews, and I have only seen one other example, which I in turn
contributed to fill the vacant place in the shelves of Mr. Knight. His
example, however, is far the more curious of the twain, by virtue of
Aytoun's annotations.

I had been wanting to see _The Death-Wake_ ever since, as a boy, I
read the unkind review of it in an ancient volume of _Blackwood's
Magazine_. In its "pure purple mantle" of glazed cloth, with paper
label, it is an unaffectedly neat and well-printed little volume.

It would be unbecoming and impertinent to point out to any one who has
an ear for verse, the charm of such lines as--

"A murmur far and far, of those that stirred
Within the great encampment of the sea."

Or--

"A love-winged seraph glides in glory by,
Striking the tent of its mortality."

(An idea anticipated by the as yet unknown Omar Khayyam).

Or--

"Dost thou, in thy vigil, hail
Arcturus in his chariot pale,
Leading him with a fiery flight
Over the hollow hill of night?"

These are wonderful verses for a lad of twenty-one, living among
anglers, undergraduates, and, if with some society of the lettered,
apparently with none which could appreciate or applaud him.

For the matter of the poem, the wild voyage of the mad monkish lover
with the dead Bride of Heaven, it strikes, of course, on the common
reef of the Romantic--the ridiculous. But the recurring contrasts of a
pure, clear peace in sea and sky, are of rare and atoning beauty. Such
a passage is--

"And the great ocean, like a holy hall,
Wh