tradition which he told me about this house of mine, I got the idea of a
deathless man, which is now taking a shape very different from the
original one." This refers to the tradition mentioned in the editor's
note to "Septimius Felton," and forms a link in the interesting chain of
evidence connecting that romance with the "Dolliver Romance." With the
plan respecting Thoreau he combined the idea of writing an
autobiographical preface, wherein The Wayside was to be described, after
the manner of his Introduction to the "Mosses from an Old Manse"; but, so
far as is known, nothing of this was ever actually committed to paper.

Beginning with the idea of producing an English romance, fragments of
which remain to us in "The Ancestral Footstep," and the incomplete work
known as "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret," he replaced these by another design,
of which "Septimius Felton" represents the partial execution. But that
elaborate study yielded, in its turn, to "The Dolliver Romance." The last-
named work, had the author lived to carry it out, would doubtless have
become the vehicle of a profound and pathetic drama, based on the
instinctive yearning of man for an immortal existence, the attempted
gratification of which would have been set forth in a variety of ways:
First, through the selfish old sensualist, Colonel Dabney, who greedily
seized the mysterious elixir and took such a draught of it that he
perished on the spot; then, through the simple old Grandsir, anxious to
live for Pansie's sake; and, perhaps, through Pansie herself, who, coming
into the enjoyment of some ennobling love, would wish to defeat death, so
that she might always keep the perfection of her mundane happiness,--all
these forms of striving to be made the adumbration of a higher one, the
shadow-play that should direct our minds to the true immortality beyond
this world.

G. P. L.