ion of
greatness too often seems afraid he will lose it if he does not forever
advertise it by fireworks of cleverness and wit.

Henley's talk had too a strange mixture of the brutal and the tender,
the rough and the fine, a blending of the highest things with what might
seem to the ordinary man the most trivial. I asked two old friends of
his the other day what they remembered best of him and of his talk. The
answer of one was: "He was certainly the most stupendous Jove-like
creature who ever lived, and I did not in the least mind his calling me
Billy, which I have always hated from others." The second answer was:
"He talked as he wrote, and I know of nothing more characteristic of his
talking and his writing than that tragic poem in which, with his heart
crying for the child he had adored and lost, he could compare himself to
'an old black rotter of a boat' past service, and could see, when
criticised for it, nothing discordant in that slang _rotter_ dropped
into such verse!" A good deal of Henley is in both answers. This
curious blend must have especially struck everybody who saw him and
listened to him in his own home. I can recall summer Sunday afternoons
at Addiscombe, with Henley sitting on a rug spread on the lawn behind
his house, Mrs. Henley at his side, his eyes following with twinkling
tenderness his little daughter as she ran backwards and forwards busy
with the manifold cares of childhood, while all the time, to his Young
Men gathered round him, he was thundering against the last book, or the
last picture show, or the last new music, in language not unworthy of
Defoe or Smollett, for Henley could call a spade not only a spade but a
steam shovel when so minded. He could soar to the heights and dive to
the depths in the same breath.

But Henley's talk was animated above all by the intense and virile love
of life that I was so conscious of in him personally, that reveals
itself in every line he wrote, and that is what I liked best about him.
He was so alive, so exhilarated with the sense of being alive. The
tremendous vitality of the man, that should have found its legitimate
outlet in physical activity, seemed to have gone instead into his
thought and his expression of it--as if the very fact that fate forced
him to remain a looker-on had made him the more sensitive to the
beauty, the joy, the challenge in everything life gave him to look at.
He could wrest romance even out of the drear, drab hospital--ther