VI.  DEAD LOVE AND OTHER INEDITED PIECES
BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

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The Bibelot

FROM a collector’s point of view the value of this number of The Bibelot cannot well be gainsaid. No less than six inedited, if not wholly disowned, pieces of prose and verse by the greatest living English poet are here brought together from sources unlikely of public access. To affirm that this is an unholy labor, — a ghoulish feat of the literary resurrectionest, — is to lose sight and sense of the question at issue.

Editorially we believe our reprint is more than justifiable; it is, in fact from a bibliographical outlook the highest tribute to a great writer that his contemporaries can pay. Unconsidered trifles — as such things may seem to the unconsiderate trifler — they are yet compounded of an “aureate Earth”

“As, buried once, Men want dug up again.”

Therefore beside the youthful work of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti these compositions find due place. One of the two specimens of early prose shows conclusively that Mr. Swinburne was already in possession of a style bound to find its logical development in the collected [186] Essays and Studies of a few years later growth. The interlude extracted from a forgotten little tale — The Children of the Chapel — proves also the mastery of that stanzaic stateliness which so speedily would burgeon forth in a golden book for all time — the Poems and Ballads of 1866.

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DEAD LOVE | BY | ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE. | LONDON |JOHN W. PARKER AND SON, WEST STRAND. | 1864.

Collation: — Crown octavo, pp. 15; consisting of Half-title (with blank reverse), pp. 1-2; Title-page, as above (with imprint — “London: | Savill and Edwards, Printers, Chandos Street, | Covent Garden.” — in the centre of the reverse), pp. 3-4; and Text pp. 5-15. The headline is Dead Love throughout, on both sides of the page. The imprint is repeated at the foot of p. 15. Issued in brick-red coloured paper wrappers, with the title-page reproduced upon the front. There is a copy in the British Museum.

A little book of great rarity, and of extreme interest. The story (in prose) had previously appeared in Once-a-Week, vol. vii, October 1862, pp. 432-434, where it was accompanied by an illustration upon wood by Mr. J. Lawless, here reproduced in facsimile. The story has never been reprinted, and in all probability never will be.

THOMAS J. WISE .

(A Bibliographical List of the Scarcer Works and Uncollected Writings of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1896.)