PREFACE
"The Altar of the Dead" forms part of a volume bearing the title of "Terminations," which appeared in 1895. Figuring last in that collection of short pieces, it here stands at the head of my list, not as prevaillng over its companions by length, but as being ample enough and of an earlier date than several. I have to add that with this fact of its temporal order, and the fact that, as I remember, it had vainly been "hawked about," knocking, in the world of magazines, at half-a-dozen editorial doors impenetrably closed to it, I shall have exhausted my fund of allusion to the influences attending its birth. I consult memory further to no effect; so that if I should seem to have lost every trace of "how I came to think" of such a motive, didn't I, by a longer reach of reflexion, help myself back to the state of not having had to think of it? The idea embodied in this composition must in other words never have been so absent from my view as to call for an organised search. It was "there"—it had always, or from ever so far back, been there, not interfering with other conceits, yet at the same time not interfered with; and it naturally found expression at the first hour something more urgently undertaken happened not to stop the way. The way here, I recognise, would ever have been easy to stop, for the general patience, the inherent waiting
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