On August 20, 1890, died Wathen Mark Wilks Call, M. A.,—a spirit finely touched to fine issues. The posthumous work before me revives the sense of personal bereavement, but soothes it with the satisfaction of holding another interview with the beloved scholar on themes that through many years engaged our conversation. Here is a casket of golden thoughts cast up from the deep where went down the white-winged ship freighted with such treasures. The general world is unconscious that it is poorer; its ports and marts had little welcome for the dainty wares of this unfamiliar bark. Many an American thinker will through this specimen of the sunken treasures realise the world’s loss when it is irreparable; and some who used to hover around the silver sail now vanished, and come ashore laden with its gifts, have wondered that this writer, valued by Mill, George Eliot, and the scholarly English circle, should have courted obscurity rather than fame. He was not indolent, though his published volumes were few: “Lyra Hellenica” (1842), “Reverberations” (1849, second edition 1876), “Golden Histories” (1871). Besides his poems, his contributions in the reviews,—some, like “The Nero Saga” (_Theological Review_, July, 1871), equal to volumes,—would make a substantial and important collection. There is enough thought and learning in his poems and anonymous articles, to have earned fame for an ambitious and pushing author. Why then did the world get so much less than it ought to have got from this fine and active brain, and why is he so little known? Many years ago I heard from his own lips the story of his life, which is partly told in the fifty pages that introduce this book, under the title “A Chapter from my Autobiography.” It will there be seen that even so late as thirty-six years ago the finest minds and hearts that could not accept creed-dogmas might be almost mortally wounded. From that time he lived and wrote as from a retreat. The actual case, as he told it me, was that his sister, a widow, left him executor of her last will and testament, and the guardian of her children. He was tenderly attached to this sister and to her children. She knew his opinions and his doubts. When he went into the court for confirmation of his trust he was confronted by the postscript of a letter he had written to a supposed friend intimating his “dissent from the creeds of the churches.” For this mild and vague heresy he was prevented from acting as the guardian of his sister’s children, and fulfilling a sacred trust.