was gradually losing, too, the faculty of experience,
and in his prose and verse repeated the old ideas and emotions, but
faintly, as though with fading interest. I am certain that he prayed much,
and on those rare days that I came upon him dressed and active before
midday or but little after, I concluded that he had been to morning Mass
at Farm Street.

When with Johnson I had tuned myself to his mood, but Arthur Symons, more
than any man I have ever known, could slip as it were into the mind of
another, and my thoughts gained in richness and in clearness from his
sympathy, nor shall I ever know how much my practice and my theory owe to
the passages that he read me from Catullus and from Verlaine and Mallarme.
I had read _Axel_ to myself or was still reading it, so slowly, and with
so much difficulty, that certain passages had an exaggerated importance,
while all remained so obscure that I could without much effort imagine
that here at last was the Sacred Book I longed for. An Irish friend of
mine lives in a house where beside a little old tower rises a great new
Gothic hall and stair, and I have sometimes got him to extinguish all
light but a little Roman lamp, and in that faint light and among great
vague shadows, blotting away the unmeaning ornament, have imagined myself
partaking in some incredible romance. Half-a-dozen times, beginning in
boyhood with Shelley's _Prometheus Unbound_, I have in that mood possessed
for certain hours or months the book that I long for; and Symons, without
ever being false to his own impressionist view of art and of life,
deepened as I think my longing.

It seems to me, looking backward, that we always discussed life at its
most intense moment, that moment which gives a common sacredness to the
Song of Songs, and to the Sermon on the Mount, and in which one discovers
something supernatural, a stirring as it were of the roots of the hair. He
was making those translations from Mallarme and from Verlaine, from
Calderon, from St. John of the Cross, which are the most accomplished
metrical translations of our time, and I think that those from Mallarme
may have given elaborate form to my verses of those years, to the latter
poems of _The Wind Among the Reeds_, to _The Shadowy Waters_, while
Villiers de L'Isle Adam had shaped whatever in my _Rosa Alchemica_ Pater
had not shaped. I can remember the day in Fountain Court when he first
read me Herodiade's address to some Sibyl who is her nurse a