Page:Stories after Nature.pdf/12

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viii
PREFACE.

not how I became impressed with the idea that the two were intimate, and so closely associated that the drama was written in a sort of rivalry and proud feeling of competition with Keats. I may have learned something of this from two other poets, R. H. Horne and Thomas Wade, with both of whom in young days I was well acquainted (Wade indeed my brother-in-law). These two, Horne and Wade, like Wells, and like Reynolds and Darley and Beddoes and W. B. Scott and others, yet stand among the "inheritors of unfulfilled renown." Wade was the author of a considerable volume of poems, Mundi et Cordis Carmina, published in 1835; and in 1837 Moxon brought out, as the beginning of an intended new volume, a sheet of fourteen verse-pages, the Contention of Death and Love, in which I again found the name of Wells—

"Whose genius sleeps for his applause,"

with the following note:

"The name of Wells illustrates this Lyric.