Howard Phillips Lovecraft passed away on March 15th, after a month of painful illness. His death will be a personal bereavement to all lovers of fine imaginative writing as well as to the friends who were privileged to know and esteem and love him. Among these friends must be counted many who never met him face to face, but who found in him the princeliest of all correspondents: a mind of unequalled brilliance and erudition, fired with manifold enthusiasms, given to the "noble pleasure" of praising where praise was in any wise due; a source of never- failing inspiration, illumination, generosity, helpfulness, enheartenment to others. The loss is profound and irreparable for us who remain behind: for it is safe to say that his peer will not be found again.
His published writings require no enconium, since they are familiar to all who will read this page. They are comparable to Poe on the grounds of merit but are wholly individual and unique. Their classic style, their consummate realism of detail, their intense distillation of atmosphere, their sustained wing-flight on the black outer cosmos or into stark prehuman antiquities, all combine to the creation of a new literary dimension. Like the personality that produced them, they will never be duplicated.