PREFACE

To those who may favor these pages with perusal, I make this earnest request: that, if they commence, they will read all. Knowing that the best mode of dealing with doubts is to state and refute, successively, I regret that the plan of the present work forces a separation of the statement and refutation. To read one without the other were to defeat the object in view; hence my request.

Many of the subjects of thought are worn smooth with the touch of ages, so that hope for originality is as slender as the bridge of Al Sirat; but in the bulrush ark of self-confidence, pitched with Faith, I commit my first-born to the Nile of public opinion; whether to perish by crocodile critics, or bask in the palace of favor, the Future, alone, must determine. May Pharaoh’s daughter find it!

E. W. F.

Louisburg, Jan. 17th, 1871.

A NOTE

First published more than thirty-five years ago, in the lifetime of the poet, THE ANGEL IN THE CLOUD has long since passed not only out of print but out of the memory of most living men. Of the copies of the original edition, only few are known to exist. Upon his surviving family is imposed the obligation, and to them comes the privilege, of rescuing from the realm of forgotten things these evidences of a graceful and genuine poetic gift in one whose memory they revere and whose genius they are unwilling to have die. It is therefore with the sense of performing a grateful duty that they have caused to be printed this new edition of Edwin Fuller’s poems, in the hope and belief that others, like themselves, will value it both as friends of the gentle poet and as disinterested lovers of good literature.

August, 1907.{1}

{2}

{3}

THE VILLAGE ON THE TAR DEDICATED TO PETTIGREW COUNCIL NO 1. F. OF T.

[A] The Indian name of this river was Taw.—Publisher.

THE DEVIL OUTDONE; OR, THE GUARD OF THE SULPHUR LAKE

To her who sent me the Valentine with the cutting irony, “Don’t I look pretty in church?” these lines are respectfully inscribed. Not knowing her name, I will call her “Taters,” as she drew her elegant and tasty simile from that vegetable.

THE SUNFLOWER

LINES SUGGESTED BY OBSERVING GEN. PETTIGREW’S NAME OMITTED IN MRS. DOWNING’S “MEMORIAL FLOWERS” AND IN THE “SOUTHERN BOUQUET”

AN ELEGY WRITTEN ON THE ROTUNDA STEPS, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, 1868

THE EPIGRAM

LINES, WRITTEN AFTER HAVING A HEMORRHAGE FROM THE LUNGS

Written a short time before his death and handed to his wife with the request, “Do not open this until I am well, or until my death.”

THE END