athy.

This morbidness seldom accompanies genuine poetic gifts. The case of
David Gray, the young Scottish poet who died in 1861, is an instance
to the contrary. His lot was exceedingly sad, and the failure of
health just as he was on the verge of achieving something like success
justified his profound melancholy; but that he tuned this melancholy and
played upon it, as if it were a musical instrument, is plainly seen in
one of his sonnets.

In Monckton Milnes's (Lord Houghton's) "Life and Letters of John Keats"
it is related that Keats, one day, on finding a stain of blood upon his
lips after coughing, said to his friend Charles Brown: "I know the color
of that blood; it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived. That drop
is my death-warrant. I must die." Who that ever read the passage
could forget it? David Gray did not, for he versified the incident as
happening to himself and appropriated, as his own, Keats's comment:

Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain,
There came arterial blood, and with a sigh
Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein,
That drop is my death-warrant; I must die.

The incident was likely enough a personal experience, but the comment
should have been placed in quotation marks. I know of few stranger
things in literature than this poet's dramatization of another man's
pathos. Even Keats's epitaph--_Here lies one whose name_ _was writ in
water_--finds an echo in David Gray's _Below lies one whose name was
traced in sand_. Poor Gray was at least the better prophet.

WISHMAKERS' TOWN

A LIMITED edition of this little volume of verse, which seems to me
in many respects unique, was issued in 1885, and has long been out of
print. The reissue of the book is in response to the desire off certain
readers who have not forgotten the charm which William Young's poem
exercised upon them years ago, and, finding the charm still potent,
would have others share it.

The scheme of the poem, for it is a poem and not simply a series of
unrelated lyrics, is ingenious and original, and unfolds itself in
measures at once strong and delicate. The mood of the poet and the
method of the playwright are obvious throughout. Wishmakers' Town--a
little town situated in the no-man's-land of "The Tempest" and "A
Midsummer Night's Dream"--is shown to us as it awakens, touched by the
dawn. The clangor of bells far and near calls the townfolk to their
various avocations, the toiler to his