CLARENCE KING. 



every cadence thrills with the solemnity and the vastness of the 

 subject." 



Of his occasional articles in current periodicals, two appeared 

 in the Century in 1886, two in the North American Review, and 

 three in Forum. Of the latter, two on Cuba, published in the 

 years immediately preceding the Spanish War, were written 

 under the impulse of strong feelings of sympathy with the cause 

 of the insurgents, with whom he had come into intimate personal 

 contact during the winter he spent on the island. 



Of his Century articles, one was a delicate tribute to his closest 

 friend, John Hay, as one of the biographers of Lincoln; the 

 other, a short sketch of his search for the "Helmet of Mam- 

 brino" for a fellow-Cervantista, was that which more than any- 

 thing he ever published disclosed the exquisite delicacy of his 

 literary touch, which rivaled that of Howells or James and 

 showed an even rarer and more refined quality of wit than Bret 

 Harte's. 



The best idea of the estimation in which he was held by his 

 many friends and associates in the literary and artistic world 

 may be obtained from the following quotation from the necrol- 

 ogy of the Century Association of New York, of which he had 

 been a prominent member for the last quarter of a century : 



"He was himself a blend of varied qualities and gifts that were 

 not always ready to keep the peace one with another, but the col- 

 lective manifestation of which was to his fellows a constant joy. 

 The talk he made or evoked may be equaled by those who are to' 

 come after; it can never be matched. Its range was literally 

 incalculable. It was impossible to foresee at what point his 

 tangential fancy would change its course. From the true 

 rhythm of Creole gumbo to the verse of Theocritus, from the 

 origin of the latest mot to the age of the globe, from the soar or 

 slump of the day's market to the method of Lippo Lippi, from 

 the lightest play on words to the subtlest philosophy, he passed 

 with buoyant step and head erect, sometimes with audacity that 

 invited disaster, often with profound penetration and with the- 

 informing flash of genius. It is but a suggestion of his rare 

 equipment to say that in his talk, as in his work, his imagination 

 was his dominant, at moments his dominating quality. Intense,, 

 restless, wide-reaching, nourished by much reading, trained in 



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