GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS
by his blindness and partial paralysis. During Mrs. Stoddard's fatal illness, his brain teemed with images and melodies which he could not get into form. The snatches of song, nevertheless, which were taken down imperfectly by his attendant, were quite as coherent as the thumb-nail sketches of an artist, or the first notes of a writer, and if the poet could have renewed his power of work but for an interval, beautiful results might have come from them.
As it was, under stress of an unusual excitement he ever had but one refuge—that of artistic expression. From an almost illegible note to me, dated, but not then delivered, "Sept. 3, 1902, circa 10:30," I can make out such bits as these: "I have done in the rough, since say July 6, some twenty or more poems, possibly . . . some good others bad. . . . But, no indeed, I think I have been an instrument with which unseen hands played their own tunes. I never made these things. . . . would be glad if I could. Puck and Ober have let loose in 15th Street, Liberty and Sag Harbor, and the pipers have been paid." One of these poems was this threnody, which seems to reveal an intensely poetic renascence of the lyrical quality and thought of a noble prime—which so few now living can recall to mind. Few indeed survive who knew him before the maladies which came upon him in middle age so told upon his spirits and bodily power. The lyric is given exactly according to a version which Mr. Stoddard managed to write for me with his own hand, except for some needful punctuation and indentation. I have resisted advice to
[168]
