Howard Pyle, a chronicle by Charles D. Abbott, with an introduction by N. C. Wyeth and many illustrations from Howard Pyle's works.

PHILOSOPHER AND MYSTIC
This essay embodying Howard Pyle's thoughts on immortality was never completed. In the meantime he had begun
making illustrations for a series of Howells's poems which
were appearing in Harper's Monthly and which were later
published under the title, Stops of Various Quills.' In
these poems, to quote from Delmar Gross Cooke's literary
study of Howells, "we feel that pessimism is assuming the
cast and complexion of a philosophy. And it is all-pervasive. Howard Pyle, who illustrates the book lavishly,
has expressed it perfectly, albeit after the German mythological manner of the Boecklin school. The baubles of the
mask, the death's head, the thorns, and the bitter chalice are
its symbols. The fiddler Death, or the grim reaper with
sickle and glass, stalks through its pages while angels weep
and mortals bid him stay. Melancholia is written large
over all...." When the book was finally published and the
original drawings were returned to the artist, he sent the
picture of the Sphinx to Howells, who had expressed great
admiration for 'It. In a letter sent simultaneously with the
picture, he said, " - ". It seemed to me that, in your
poems, the piping Pan of your soul went up into j ust such
twilight altitudes as I have tried to depict, and hearing the
sudden dim rustle of wings, turned so to see his Sphinx
crouching where she had not been before. I want you to
have the picture for that reason..10 2
The connection with Howells and the stimulus which his
correspondence gave to Howard Pyle's mysticism led also
to the writing of two short stories of rather an unusual nature, "In Tenebras"' and "To the Soil of the Earth."
"1Published 1895, Harper & Brothers.
2'To W. D. Howells, November 3, 11895.
'Harper's New Monthly Magazine, February, 1894, vol. lxxxviii, P. 392.
'The Cosmopolitan, June, 1892, VOL. xiii, P. 217 -['9']1