influence in his life.

NOCTURNE

Round and round the shutter'd Square
I strolled with the Devil's arm in mine.
No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there
And the ring of his laughter and mine.
We had drunk black wine.

I scream'd, "I will race you, Master!"
"What matter," he shriek'd, "to-night
Which of us runs the faster?
There is nothing to fear to-night
In the foul moon's light!"

Then I look'd him in the eyes
And I laugh'd full shrill at the lie he told
And the gnawing fear he would fain disguise.
It was true, what I'd time and again been told:
He was old--old.

There was, I felt, quite a swing about that first stanza--a joyous and
rollicking note of comradeship. The second was slightly hysterical,
perhaps. But I liked the third, it was so bracingly unorthodox, even
according to the tenets of Soames's peculiar sect in the faith. Not
much "trusting and encouraging" here! Soames triumphantly exposing the
devil as a liar, and laughing "full shrill," cut a quite heartening
figure, I thought, then! Now, in the light of what befell, none of his
other poems depresses me so much as "Nocturne."

I looked out for what the metropolitan reviewers would have to say.
They seemed to fall into two classes: those who had little to say and
those who had nothing. The second class was the larger, and the words
of the first were cold; insomuch that

Strikes a note of modernity. . . . These tripping numbers.--"The
Preston Telegraph."

was the only lure offered in advertisements by Soames's publisher. I
had hoped that when next I met the poet I could congratulate him on
having made a stir, for I fancied he was not so sure of his intrinsic
greatness as he seemed. I was but able to say, rather coarsely, when
next I did see him, that I hoped "Fungoids" was "selling splendidly."
He looked at me across his glass of absinthe and asked if I had bought
a copy. His publisher had told him that three had been sold. I
laughed, as at a jest.

"You don't suppose I CARE, do you?" he said, with something like a
snarl. I disclaimed the notion. He added that he was not a tradesman.
I said mildly that I wasn't, either, and murmured that an artist who
gave truly new and great things to the world had always to wait long
for recognition. He said he cared not a sou for recognition. I agreed
that the act of creation was its own reward.

His moroseness might have alienated me i