Halek's Stories and Evensongs/Bibliography
W. W. STRICKLAND
Vishnu
or
The Planet Of The Sevenfold Unity
An autobiographical, scientific and mystical Romance
As the title indicates, Vishnu is a biographical, scientific, and mystical romance. Poe, Jules Verne, and W. G. Wells have before and since set the fashion of sending their characters on a visit to some sublunary sphere. It may perhaps be boasted that in Vishnu the method is subtler and somewhat less improbable than in the works of these distinguished writers. Although discursive in form, the unity of the piece has been preserved and to give a bare summary of the story would mar far more than benefit such vitality as it may possess. The judicious reader will trace the influence of the late George Eliot, though the author did not know her personally, more particularly perhaps of her last novel, “Daniel Deronda”. To those for whom the insoluble riddles of existence have their attractions, but who find insufficient the solutions of bygone superstitions, not to speak of the atmosphere of mysticism which surrounds the whole conceit, Vishnu will likely enough appeal.
B. Westermann Co., Inc. / New York
W. W. STRICKLAND
Three Trilogies
or
Nine Dramas in Prose and Verse
Each trilogy consists of a tragedy, comedy, and satyric drama. Most of the ideas occurred to the author during his travels in Italy and at Taormina in Sicily when that island was in full brigandage and the pastoral and forest beauties of Taormina had not been destroyed by the axe and the modern villa nor its charms by the modern tourists.
The plays, however, were composed during a period of roving life as conchologist in Australia, New Zealand and in Sicily itself. The “Shrieking Sisterhood” was written at Richmond in England and the first half of “Hinemoa” during a violent squall in a small steamer about 25 years ago between Nelson and Wellington, New Zealand.
The nine dramas are:
Orpheus and Eurydice The Glorified Thief
The Shrieking Sisterhood
Hinemoa Dido and Æneas Aphrodite
A Slight Misunderstanding
Gosling Gold St. Romauld’s Cell
B. Westermann Co., Inc. / New York
W. W. STRICKLAND
Epicurean Essays
in Verse and Prose
The volume is a collection of thirty-eight essays in prose and verse ranging over a very wide field. There are sonnets, lovesongs, satirical verse, essays on scientific and philosophical questions, brief “skits”, and a complete précis of the whole of the Kalevalá, the great Finn Epic in fifty runes. In many of the metrical pieces there is the ring of real poetry.
Poems
in two Volumes
The two volumes of poetry here presented to the public embrace the bulk of literary poetic effort of the author from 1868, when the Price Poem, “William Tyndale”, was written, down to the “Red Sea” composed 1928. These collections with those comprised in other volumes containing prose and verse, possess a somewhat greater variety than the conventional flatulence, which is beginning to bring the modern bard into not quite undeserved discredit. Mr. Strickland is also very successful as a translator especially so in “Hanuman”, a mock-heroic poem by Svatopluk Čech, in which he has preserved the original metres and system of double-rhyming which distinguish the original work.
B. Westermann Co., Inc. / New York
W. W. STRICKLAND
The Smuggler’s Dog
and other Essays
in Literature and Science
The title-sketch of this volume is a pathetic story of life on the Italo-Swiss frontier, and won the approval of so good a judge as the late Bishop of Durham, Dr. Westcott. The remaining essays are wide in their range in literature, science, religion, and politics, including amongst others: “A New Theory about Shakespeare”; a satirical essay, “On Some Moral and Literary Beauties of the British Hymnal”, “Food and Morals”, “The Limits of Applied Science”, “World Empire without War”, “The Extinction of Mankind” and a striking sketch entitled “The Convent of the Abruzzi”.
Sacrifice
or
The Daughter of the Sun
A Prehistoric Arctic Tragi-Comedy
for Stage and Cinematograph
Panslavonic Folk⸗Lore
This volume comprises a translation of Karel Erben’s collection of popular Slavonic Fairy Stories. Mr. Strickland has added illustrative diagrams, tables, and supplementary notes, essays, and introductions, in which he explains and develops the theory that these fairy stories have been derived from an Arctic annual myth.
B. Westermann Co., Inc. / New York
Walter William Strickland, formerly English Baronet, was born in London in the year 1851. He left England about thirty years ago and had made since then extensive travels in Europe, the Dutch Indies, the Malay Archipelago, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Japan, and other countries, studying the language, the literature, traditions, habits, and customs of the people he lived among. As a result of a laborious study of over ten years of the Slav languages he has translated and published four of Viteslav Halek’s best stories, Svatopluk Čech’s now classical mock-epic Hanuman, also the whole of Karel Erben’s one hundred original folk-lore stories with elaborate comments and diagrams and other translations still in manuscript. It is not possible here to give a complete list of Mr. Strickland’s numerous works. Besides being a poet and writer, his collections in conchology and still more most extensive observations on phyllotaxis resulting in a workable explanation have been recognized by eminent scientists.
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