er the death of his six-year old
daughter. Few passages of his verse touch me as do those few mentions of
her though they lack precision of word and sound. When she is but a hope,
he prays that she may have his 'gift of life' and his wife's 'gift of
love,' and when she is but a few months old he murmurs over her sleep--

When you wake in your crib,
You an inch of experience--
Vaulted about
With the wonder of darkness;
Wailing and striving
To reach from your feebleness
Something you feel
Will be good to and cherish you.

And now he commends some friend "boyish and kind, and shy," who greeted
him, and greeted his wife, "that day we brought our beautiful one to lie
in the green peace" and who is now dead himself, and after that he speaks
of love "turned by death to longing" and so, to an enemy.

When I spoke to him of his child's death he said, "she was a person of
genius; she had the genius of the mind, and the genius of the body." And
later I heard him talk of her as a man talks of something he cannot keep
silence over because it is in all his thoughts. I can remember, too, his
talking of some book of natural history he had read, that he might be able
to answer her questions.

He had a house now at Mortlake on the Thames with a great ivy tod
shadowing door and window, and one night there he shocked and startled a
roomful of men by showing how far he could be swept beyond our reach in
reveries of affection. The dull man, who had tried to put Wilde out of
countenance, suddenly said to the whole room, roused by I cannot remember
what incautious remark of mine made to some man at my side: "Yeats
believes in magic; what nonsense." Henley said, "No, it may not be
nonsense; black magic is all the go in Paris now." And then turning
towards me with a changed sound in his voice, "It is just a game, isn't
it." I replied, not noticing till too late his serious tone, and wishing
to avoid discussion in the dull man's company, "One has had a vision; one
wants to have another, that is all." Then Henley said, speaking in a very
low voice, "I want to know how I am to get to my daughter. I was sitting
here the other night when she came into the room and played round the
table and went out again. Then I saw that the door was shut and I knew
that I had seen a vision." There was an embarrassed silence, and then
somebody spoke of something else and we began to discuss it hurriedly and
eagerly.

V

I came now to be