Shadows of the Stage Part 9

THE END.

THE WORKS OF

WILLIAM WINTER.

"The supreme need of this age in America is a practical conviction that progress does not consist in material prosperity, but in spiritual advancement. Utility has long been exclusively worshipped. The welfare of the future lies in the worship of beauty. To that worship these pages are devoted, with all that implies of sympathy with the higher instincts, and faith in the divine destiny of the human race."--_From the Preface to Gray Days and Gold_.

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

WANDERERS;

BEING

A Collection of the Poems of William Winter.

New Edition, Revised and Enlarged. With a Portrait of the Author.

"But it has seemed to the author of these poems--which of course are offered as absolutely impersonal--that they are the expression of various representative moods of human feeling and various representative aspects of human experience, and that therefore they may possibly possess the inherent right to exist."--_From the Preface_.

"The verse of Mr. Winter is dedicated mainly to love and wine, to flowers and birds and dreams, to the hackneyed and never-to-be-exhausted repertory of the old singers. His instincts are strongly conservative; his confessed aim is to belong to 'that old school of English Lyrical Poetry, of which gentleness is the soul, and simplicity the garment.'"--_Sat.u.r.day Review_.

"The poems have a singular charm in their graceful spontaneity."--_Scots Observer_.

"Free from cant and rant--clear cut as a cameo, pellucid as a mountain brook. It may be derided as trite, _borne_, unimpa.s.sioned; but in its own modest sphere it is, to our thinking, extraordinarily successful, and satisfies us far more than the pretentious mouthing which receives the seal of over-hasty approbation."--_Athenaeum_.

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.

SHADOWS OF THE STAGE.

"The fame of the actor more than that of any other artist is an evanescent one--a 'bubble reputation'--indeed, and necessarily so from the conditions under which his genius is exercised. While the impression it makes is often more vivid and inspiring for the moment than that of the poet and the painter, it vanishes almost with the occasion which gave it birth, and lives only as a tradition in the memory of those to whom it had immediately appealed. 'Shadows they are, and shadows they pursue.'

"The writer, therefore, who, gifted with insight and a poetic enthusiasm which enables him to discern on the one hand the beauties in a dramatic work not perceived by the many, and on the other the qualities in the actor which have made him a true interpreter of the poet's thought, at the same time possessing the faculty of revealing to us felicitously the one, and the other is certainly ent.i.tled to our grateful recognition.

"Such a writer is Mr. William Winter, easily the first,--for we know of none other living in this country, or in the England he loves so much, in whose nature the critic's vision is united with that of the poet so harmoniously....

"Over and above all this, there is in these writings the same charm of style, poetic glamour and flavor of personality which distinguish whatever comes to us from Mr. Winter's pen, and which make them unique in our literature."--_Home Journal_, New York

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.

OLD SHRINES AND IVY.

CONTENTS.

_SHRINES OF HISTORY._

I. Storied Southampton.

II. Pageantry and Relics.

III. The Shakespeare Church.

IV. A Stratford Chronicle.

V. From London to Dover.

VI. Beauties of France.

VII. Ely and its Cathedral.

VIII. From Edinburgh to Inverness.

IX. The Field of Culloden.

X. Stormbound Iona.

_SHRINES OF LITERATURE._

XI. The Forest of Arden: As You Like It.

XII. Fairy Land: A Midsummer Night's Dream.