X.
But in this volume, I believe, there is something of John Witt Randall which the world will not willingly let die. Out of the chaos of his manuscripts, what is here preserved is all that seems to be available. In about a dozen copies of the " Consolations of Solitude," used in- discriminately, it was his habit from time to time to write corrections, interlineations, and notes. These have been carefully collated, and, where there were many varying readings, those which seemed the best (there are no in- dications of date to guide to the latest) have been selected. Still more difficult has it been to deal with the previously unpublished poems. All I can say is that I have done the best I could with minute and faint pencillings, incredi- bly close writing, half-erasures, unnumbered pages, inter- minable variations of lines and stanzas, unfinished work begun over and over again, and a general state of confusion out of which Randall himself despaired of ever educing order. Under such conditions, there are masses of manu- script that I must surrender as defying my best efforts. All that is here published has had to be freshly copied for the printer, a labor impossible to delegate to another hand. I must crave indulgence for probable failures of judgment, but believe I need ask none for failure of faithful effort to discharge a very perplexing duty.
For the poems themselves, as such, it would be rash for a personal friend to make exaggerated claims. Their superlative value lies, I conceive, in the man they reveal — in the self-reporting quality of his nature and his character. Like the Bryant whom he admired, there is more of the
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