he same, the same
thoughts interest and amuse them; but the attitude of a Frenchman's mind is
absolutely opposed to that of an Englishman; they stand on either side of a
vast abyss, two animals different in colour, form, and temperament;--two
ideas destined to remain irrevocably separate and distinct. I have heard of
writing and speaking two languages equally well: this was impossible to me,
and I am convinced that if I had remained two more years in France I should
never have been able to identify my thoughts with the language I am now
writing in, and I should have written it as an alien. As it was I only just
escaped this detestable fate. And it was in the last two years, when I
began to write French verse and occasional _chroniques_ in the papers,
that the great damage was done. I remember very well indeed one day, while
arranging an act of a play I was writing with a friend, finding suddenly to
my surprise that I could think more easily and rapidly in French than in
English; but with all this I did not learn French. I chattered, and I felt
intensely at home in it; yes, I could write a sonnet or a ballade almost
without a slip, but my prose required a good deal of alteration, for a
greater command of language is required to write in prose than in verse. I
found this in French and also in English. For when I returned from Paris,
my English terribly corrupt with French ideas and forms of thought, I could
write acceptable English verse, but even ordinary newspaper prose was
beyond my reach, and an attempt I made to write a novel drifted into a
miserable failure; but the following poems opened to me the doors of a
first-class London newspaper, and I was at once entrusted with some
important critical work:

THE SWEETNESS OF THE PAST

As sailors watch from their prison
For the faint grey line of the coasts,
I look to the past re-arisen,
And joys come over in hosts
Like the white sea birds from their roosts.

I love not the indelicate present,
The future's unknown to our quest,
To-day is the life of the peasant,
But the past is a haven of rest--
The things of the past are the best.

The rose of the past is better
Than the rose we ravish to-day,
'Tis holier, purer, and fitter
To place on the shrine where we pray
For the secret thoughts we obey.

There are there no deceptions or changes,
And there all is lovely and still;