or us now, if he rolled in too much clay of earth. Shelley might
have turned his own handsome phrase on him, for they both strode the
morning of their bright minds like sun the sky, with much of the same
solemn yet speedy gait. There are times when they are certainly of the
one radiance, lyrical and poetical. Their consuming intellectual
interests were vastly apart, as were their paths of spirit.

I think we shall have no more "dread of height". Poetry has passed
into scientific discovery. Intellectual passions are the vogue, earth
is coming into its own, for there is no more heaven in the mind. We
are showing our humanities now, and the soul must wait a little, and
remain speechless in some dull corner of the universe. Thompson was
the last to believe. We are learning to think now, so poetry has come
to calculation. Rhapsody and passion are romantic, and we are not
romantic. The last Rhapsodist was Francis Thompson, and in the sense
of lyrical fervour, the last great poet was Francis Thompson.

ERNEST DOWSON

It is late to be telling of Dowson, with the eighteen-nineties nearly
out of sight, and yet it is Dowson and Lionel Johnson that I know most
of, from the last of this period. Poles apart these two poets are, the
one so austere and almost collegiate in adherence to convention, the
other too warm to let a coldness obsess his singing. There doesn't
seem to be anything wonderful about Dowson, and yet you want to be
saying a line of his every now and then, of him "that lived, and sang,
and had a beating heart," ere he grew old, and he grew old so soon.
"Worn out by what was really never life to him," is a prefatorial
phrase I recall. There was a genuine music in Dowson, even if it was
smothered in lilies and roses and wine of the now old way of saying
things. "Come hither child, and rest--Behold the weary west," might
have been the thing he was saying to himself, so much is this the
essence of his lost cause.

There is a languor and a lack of power to lift a hand toward the
light, too much a trusting of the shadow. "I have flung roses, roses
riotously with the throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind."
Always verging on a poetic feeling not just like ourselves in these
days, and yet Dowson was a poet. He caressed words until they sang for
him the one plaint that he asked of them. That he was obsessed of the
beauties and the intimations of Versailles, is seen in everything he
did, or at least he imb