ty burn
With flames of evil ecstasy.

Because of thee, the land of dreams
Becomes a gathering place of fears:
Until tormented slumber seems
One vehemence of useless tears."

Why are these strange souls born everywhere to-day? with hearts that
Christianity, as shaped by history, cannot satisfy. Our love letters wear
out our love; no school of painting outlasts its founders, every stroke of
the brush exhausts the impulse, Pre-Raphaelitism had some twenty years;
impressionism thirty perhaps. Why should we believe that religion can
never bring round its antithesis? Is it true that our air is disturbed, as
Malarme said, by "the trembling of the veil of the temple," or "that our
whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book?" Some of us thought
that book near towards the end of last century, but the tide sank again.

X

I do not know whether John Davidson, whose life also was tragic, made that
"morbid effort," that search for "perfection of thought and feeling," for
he is hidden behind failure, to unite it "to perfection of form." At
eleven one morning I met him in the British Museum reading room, probably
in 1894, when I was in London for the production of _The Land of Heart's
Desire_, but certainly after some long absence from London. "Are you
working here?" I said; "No," he said, "I am loafing, for I have finished
my day's work." "What, already?" "I work an hour a day--I cannot work
longer without exhaustion, and even as it is, if I meet anybody and get
into talk, I cannot write the next day; that is why I loaf when my work is
finished." No one had ever doubted his industry; he had supported his wife
and family for years by "devilling" many hours a day for some popular
novelist. "What work is it?" I said. "I am writing verse," he answered. "I
had been writing prose for a long time, and then one day I thought I might
just as well write what I liked, as I must starve in any case. It was the
luckiest thought I ever had, for my agent now gets me forty pounds for a
ballad, and I made three hundred out of my last book of verse."

He was older by ten years than his fellow Rhymers; a national schoolmaster
from Scotland, he had been dismissed, he told us, for asking for a rise in
his salary, and had come to London with his wife and children. He looked
older than his years. "Ellis," he had said, "how old are you?" "Fifty,"
Edwin Ellis replied, or whatever his age was. "Then I will take off my
wig. I never take