The life of William Sidney Walker was almost as uneventful as it was unhappy; the memorials of his genius which remain are for the most part fragmentary; while the causes which produced his unhappiness and prevented or marred the full development and exercise of his intellectual powers are of a kind which it is almost impossible to render intelligible to the mind of the general reader. That he was by nature rich in those intellectual gifts which his academical contemporaries so unequivocally recognised in him, will indeed, it is hoped, be manifest even from the few and brief productions of his pen contained in the present volume. But these though the fruit of no common mind rather indicate what their author might have become than prove what he actually was. Other and more elaborate as well as larger memorials of his genius indeed remain, and are likely, before long, to see the light, which can scarcely fail to vindicate in his behalf a high and distinguished rank among the philological writers of his native country; but after all when the entire mass of what he accomplished shall come to be impartially surveyed, and compared with the brief and melancholy record of his life which these pages are intended to present, perhaps the feeling most likely to arise in the minds of intelligent readers will be regret that one capable of so much should eventually have achieved no more; that one so gifted by nature, and so accomplished by study, whose moral aims were so high and noble, whose qualifications for attaining them so great and many, should have lived and died so unhappily, leaving behind him so little effected for the instruction and improvement of his fellow men.
John Moultrie, Poetical Remains of William Sidney Walker (1852), Memoir
