f his mind. He was a common figure in the
streets and lived in some shabby neighbourhood of tenement houses where
there were hens and chickens among the cobble stones. Every morning he
carried home a loaf and gave half of it to the hens and chickens, the
birds, or to some dog or starving cat. He was known to live in one room
with a nail in the middle of the ceiling from which innumerable cords were
stretched to other nails in the walls. In this way he kept up the illusion
that he was living under canvas in some Arabian desert. I could not escape
like this old man from house and neighbourhood, but hated both, hearing
every whisper, noticing every passing glance. When my grandfather came for
a few days to see a doctor, I was shocked to see him in our house. My
father read out to him in the evening Clark Russell's "Wreck of the
Grosvenor;" but the doctor forbade it, for my grandfather got up in the
middle of the night and acted through the mutiny, as I acted my verse,
saying the while, "yes, yes, that is the way it would all happen."

XXIV

From our first arrival in Dublin, my father had brought me from time to
time to see Edward Dowden. He and my father had been college friends and
were trying, perhaps, to take up again their old friendship. Sometimes we
were asked to breakfast, and afterwards my father would tell me to read
out one of my poems. Dowden was wise in his encouragement, never
overpraising and never unsympathetic, and he would sometimes lend me
books. The orderly, prosperous house where all was in good taste, where
poetry was rightly valued, made Dublin tolerable for a while, and for
perhaps a couple of years he was an image of romance. My father would not
share my enthusiasm and soon, I noticed, grew impatient at these meetings.
He would sometimes say that he had wanted Dowden when they were young to
give himself to creative art, and would talk of what he considered
Dowden's failure in life. I know now that he was finding in his friend
what he himself had been saved from by the conversation of the
pre-Raphaelites. "He will not trust his nature," he would say, or "he is
too much influenced by his inferiors," or he would praise "Renunciants,"
one of Dowden's poems, to prove what Dowden might have written. I was not
influenced for I had imagined a past worthy of that dark, romantic face. I
took literally his verses, touched here and there with Swinburnian
rhetoric, and believed that he had loved, unhappily and