Arnold Schwab seeks to verify the author of a squib about Oscar Wilde, attributed in a 1957 anthology to Algernon Charles Swinburne: “When Oscar came to join his God./Not earth to earth, but sod to sod,/It was for sinners such as this/Hell was created bottomless.”
“missed trip to a better world” (November-December 2004). Fred Geldon and Jane Arnold provided the leads that identified “Of Missing Persons,” by Jack Finney, as the short story in question. Originally published in Finney’s 1957 anthology, The Third Level, it is reprinted in his 1986 collection, About Time.
“the Gray Swan sailed away” (July-August). William Waterhouse recognized “The Gray Swan,” by Alice Cary, re-printed in The Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary (1882), as the source of these lines.
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