It is scrawled upon old note-books and loose sheets of paper. The matter,
although a diary, contains odd bits of his writings--one of two letters
to me which he had me send back, and some extracts from an essay which
a friend of mine was offering at that time to magazines in the hope of
placing it for him. There is a problem about the work which I leave
to others to solve--how much of it was written as dated, and how much
afterward, as a piece of art, as a testament of his sorrow. Parts of it
have struck me as having been composed in the latter way, and the last
pages, of course, imply as much.

Extraordinary pages they are to me. That a man who was about to take his
life should have written them is one of the strangest cases of artistic
absorption I know of in literature. But Arthur Stirling was a man lost in
his art just so--so full of it, so drunk with it, that nothing in life had
other meaning to him. To quote the words he loved, from the last of his
heroes, he longed for excellence "as the lion longs for his food."

So he lived and so he worked; the world had no use for his work, and so he
died.

S.

NEW YORK, _November 15, 1902_.




READER:

I do not know if "The Valley of the Shadow" means to you what it means to