Preface "At the age of six, I was reciting Longfellow's "The Skeleton in Armor," from memory. Shortly would follow Wordsworth, then Tennyson, then Byron. My maternal grandfather, an Olympic gymnast, a sheriff, a self-educated lawyer, an elected judge and a commemorated race car mechanic for Louis Chevrolet in the early days of the Indianapolis 500, was also a lover (of poetry) and the books he gave me, yellowing tomes with his own favorite lines lightly underlined, were to stir in me a love of antique verse and sow the seeds of my juvenilia." W.D. St. Petersburg, Florida June, 1989