ibed this from Verlaine. He was himself a pale
wanderer down soft green allees, he had a twilight mind struggling
toward the sun, which was too bright for him, for the moon was his
brightest light. Echoes of Verlaine linger through his verse and a
strain of Poe is present, poet whom he with his French taste admired
so much, two very typical idols for a young man with a sentimental
journey to pursue. Lost Adelaides, to keep him steeped in the sorrow
that he cherished, for he petted his miseries considerably; or was it
that he was most at home when he was unhappy? He would rather have
seen the light of day from a not quite clear window, for instead of a
clear hill, he might see a vague castle of his fancy somewhere. He
hadn't the sweep of a great poet, and yet somehow there was the linnet
in him, there was the strain of the lute among the leaves, there was
the rustle of a soft dress audible, and the passing of hands he could
not ever hold.

He was the poet of the lost treasure. "Studies in Sentiment" is, I
think, the title of a small book of prose of his. He might have called
his poems "Studies in sentimentality". And yet, for his time, how
virile and vigorous he sounds beside "Posies out of Rings", of his
friend Theodore Peters, of the renaissance cloak, the cherry coloured
velvet cloak embroidered in green leaves and silver veinings, so full
of the sky radiance of Dowson himself, this cloak. Cherry sounds red
and passionate. But it was a cherry of olden time, with the bloom
quite gone, the dust of the years permeating its silken warp. It
reposes here in America, the property of an artist of that period.

One likes Dowson because of his sincerity, and a clear beauty which,
if not exactly startling, was in its way truly genuine. It was merely
too late for Dowson, and it was probably too soon. Swinburne had
strummed the skies with every kind of song, and Verlaine had whispered
every secret of the senses there was, in the land of illusion and
vaguery. Dowson was worshipper of them both, for it was sound first
and last that he cared most for, the musical mastery of the one and
the sentimentality of the other. He was far nearer Verlaine in type.
He had but the one thing to tell of, and that was lost love, and he
told it over and over in his book of verse. His Pierrot of the Minute
was himself, and his Cynara was the ever vanishing vision of his own
insecurity and incapability. He perished for the love of hands. He is
so lik