IN after days when grasses high O'er-top the stone where I shall lie, Though ill or well the world adjust My slender claim to honoured dust, I shall not question or reply. I shall not see the morning sky; But yet, now living, fain were I Saying "He held his pen in trust NOTES THIS COLLECTED POEMS.-TITLE. HIS volume is the outcome of half-a-dozen predecessors, the earliest of which was published by Messrs. Henry S. King & Co., in October, 1873. It was called Vignettes in Rhyme and Vers de Société (now first collected), i.e. from different magazines; and it was dedicated to Anthony Trollope, the original Editor of St. Paul's, to which periodical many of the pieces had been contributed. It reached a second edition in 1874, and a third in 1875. In May, 1877, it was followed by Proverbs in Porcelain and other Verses, a fresh in-gathering, also issued by Messrs. King. A second edition of this appeared in 1878, the residue of which was destroyed by a fire. In 1880, Vignettes in Rhyme and other Verses, a selection for the most part from these two books, was published at New York by Messrs. Henry Holt & Co., with a Dedication to Oliver Wendell Holmes and an Introduction by Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman. In 1883 (by which date the two English collections named above were no longer obtainable) this American selection of 1880, newly arranged, was reprinted in London by Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. (Messrs. King's successors) as Old-World Idylls; while in 1885 a second volume, entitled At the Sign of the Lyre, and mainly composed of later pieces, made its appearance both at London and New York. Besides these, and some illustrated selections, was issued in 1895 a two-volume edition of both (Poems on Several Occasions), comprising a portrait of the author by Mr. William Strang, and seven etchings by M. Adolphe Lalauze. Of this, however, which again contained |