Nearly the whole of this volume is a reprint of the serious portion ofPhantasmagoria and other Poems, which was first published in 1869 andhas long been out of print. “The Path of Roses” was written soon after theCrimean War, when the name of Florence Nightingale had already become ahousehold-word. “Only a Woman’s Hair” was suggested by a circumstancementioned in The Life of Dean Swift, viz., that, after his death, asmall packet was found among his papers, containing a single lock of hairand inscribed with those words. “After Three Days” was written afterseeing Holman Hunt’s picture, The Finding of Christ in the Temple.

The two poems, “Far Away” and “A Song of Love”, are reprinted from Sylvieand Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, books whose high price (madenecessary by the great cost of production) has, I fear, put them out ofthe reach of most of my readers. “A Lesson in Latin” is reprinted fromThe Jabberwock, a Magazine got up among the Members of “The Girls’ LatinSchool, Boston, U.S.A.” The only poems, here printed for the first time,are put together under the title of “Puck Lost and Found,” having beeninscribed in two books—Fairies, a poem by Allingham, illustrated byMiss E. Gertrude Thomson, and Merry Elves, a story-book, by whom writtenI do not know, illustrated by C. O. Murray—which were presented to alittle girl and boy, as a sort of memento of a visit paid by them to theauthor one day, on which occasion he taught them the pastime—dear to thehearts of children—of folding paper-“pistols,” which can be made toimitate, fairly well, the noise of a real one.

Jan., 1898.