ers
Were barren as this moorland hill,'

says the least self-conscious of poets. Even so barren were the rich
Nile and so bleak the blue Mediterranean waters. Though received by the
kindest and most hospitable friends, Murray was homesick, and pined to be
in England, now that spring was there. He made the great mistake of
coming home too early. At Ilminster, in his mother's home, he slowly
faded out of life. I have not the heart to quote his descriptions of
brief yet laborious saunters in the coppices, from the letters which he
wrote to the lady of his heart. He was calm, cheerful, even buoyant. His
letters to his college friends are all concerned with literature, or with
happy old times, and are full of interest in them and in their happiness.

He was not wholly idle. He wrote a number of short pieces of verse in
_Punch_, and two or three in the _St. James's Gazette_. Other work, no
doubt, he planned, but his strength was gone. In 1891 his book, _The
Scarlet Gown_, was published by his friend, Mr. A. M. Holden. The little
volume, despite its local character, was kindly received by the Reviews.
Here, it was plain, we had a poet who was to St. Andrews what the
regretted J. K. S. was to Eton and Cambridge. This measure of success
was not calculated to displease our _alumnus addictissimus_.

Friendship and love, he said, made the summer of 1892 very happy to him.
I last heard from him in the summer of 1893, when he sent me some of his
most pleasing verses. He was in Scotland; he had wandered back, a shadow
of himself, to his dear St. Andrews. I conceived that he was better; he
said nothing about his health. It is not easy to quote from his letters
to his friend, Mr. Wallace, still written in his beautiful firm hand.
They are too full of affectionate banter: they also contain criticisms on
living poets: he shows an admiration, discriminating and not wholesale,
of Mr. Kipling's verse: he censures Mr. Swinburne, whose Jacobite song
(as he wrote to myself) did not precisely strike him as the kind of thing
that Jacobites used to sing.

They certainly celebrated

'The faith our fathers fought for,
The kings our fathers knew,'

in a different tone in the North.

The perfect health of mind, in these letters of a dying man, is
admirable. Reading old letters over, he writes to Miss ---, 'I have
known a wonderful number of wonderfully kind-hearted people.' That is
his criticism of a world which ha