SOURCE: "Alexander Smith on the Art of the Essay," in If by Your Art: Testament to Percival Hunt, edited by Agnes Lynch Starrett, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1948, pp. 239-50.

Here Murphy praises Smith for his work as an essayist and as "an illuminator of the essay as a literary genre."

Should you look up Alexander Smith's biography, as Christopher Morley once threatened to do in prefacing an edition of Dreamthorp,¹ you discover he was a "Scottish poet, one of [the] chief representatives of the spasmodic school,"² who lived from 1830³ to 1867. So has the author of Dreamthorp been tagged and stored away by the literary classifiers. But meanwhile, in defiance of canon and syllabus, Smith's prose works have been widely reprinted and selected. A Summer in Skye⁴ has been issued in half a dozen editions in this century, and Dreamthorp⁵ in a dozen. His edition of Burns,⁶ distinctive for...