yet that we read out our poems,
and thought that they could be so tested, was a definition of our aims.
_Love's Nocturne_ is one of the most beautiful poems in the world, but no
one can find out its beauty, so intricate its thought and metaphor, till
he has read it over several times, or often stopped his reading to think
out the meaning of some passage, and the _Faustine_ of Swinburne, where
many separate verses are powerful and musical, could not, were it read
out, be understood with pleasure, however clearly it were read, because it
has no more logical structure than a bag of shot. I shall, however,
remember all my life that evening when Lionel Johnson read or spoke aloud
in his musical monotone, where meaning and cadence found the most precise
elocution, his poem suggested "by the Statue of King Charles at Charing
Cross." It was as though I listened to a great speech. Nor will that poem
be to me again what it was that first night. For long I only knew Dowson's
_O Mors_, to quote but the first words of its long title, and his
_Villanelle of Sunset_ from his reading, and it was because of the desire
to hold them in my hand that I suggested the first _Book of The Rhymers'
Club_. They were not speech but perfect song, though song for the speaking
voice. It was perhaps our delight in poetry that was, before all else,
speech or song, and could hold the attention of a fitting audience like a
good play or good conversation, that made Francis Thompson, whom we
admired so much--before the publication of his first poem I had brought to
the Cheshire Cheese the proof sheets of his _Ode to the Setting Sun_, his
first published poem--come but once and refuse to contribute to our book.
Preoccupied with his elaborate verse, he may have seen only that which we
renounced, and thought what seemed to us simplicity, mere emptiness. To
some members this simplicity was perhaps created by their tumultuous
lives, they praised a desired woman and hoped that she would find amid
their praise her very self, or at worst, their very passion; and knew that
she, ignoramus that she was, would have slept in the middle of _Love's
Nocturne_, lofty and tender though it be. Woman herself was still in our
eyes, for all that, romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her
shrine, our emotions remembering the _Lilith_ and the _Sybilla Palmifera_
of Rossetti; for as yet that sense of comedy, which was soon to mould the
very fashion plates, and, in the eyes