saliently from the rest. Once, when I spoke of the impossibility of enjoying wild scenery in the company of a crowd of tourists, he fell upon me fiercely for the sin of selfish exclusiveness and fancied superiority to fellow beings as good as myself. I stood my ground and pushed him with questions: whether in point of fact the spiritual and imaginative effect of certain scenes did not depend essentially on their being visited in solitude: whether, for instance, the shores of a remote Highland loch could speak to one, when a packetful of MacBrayne's trippers had just been dumped upon them, as they spoke to one when one was alone: whether, if

ties of things, proving no good to be without its evil, that the modern poetic and romantic love of wild scenes and solitudes should have had, oftener than not, the practical effect of robbing the scenes of their wildness and the solitudes of their power upon the soul. In such discussions he would not be overbearing or unreasonable or use his resources merely to crush one, and I think on this occasion I got him to a half-way agreement.

A very frequent subject of talk between us was on the duty and necessity for England of the obligation to national service. He conceived military training to be a thing desirable in every State, desirable

day was done. He believed that a more sternly trained race like the Germans would surely win against us and deserve to win. These convictions at the same time did not shake his attachment to the Liberal party in the State, which almost to a man was fanatically opposed to them. When I urged that he should strive to convert his political friends and should in writing declare his mind on the question in terms more calculated to strike home than the cryptic utterances which he puts into the mouths of a Colney Durance or a Simeon Fenellan, he was apt to answer as though the matter were one which concerned him, not as one of ourselves, but

partly to the sense of alienation from the sympathies of his countrymen that had been forced on him by their long neglect of his work. Dearly as he loved, and deeply beyond all men as he knew, the English soil, he would sometimes inveigh against defects of the English mind and character in the tone not only of a detached stranger but almost of an enemy. This from such a man, by that time at any rate recognized as one of the glories of our age and country, was the one thing that I used to find it hard to bear. The true key to his mind in the matter is perhaps to be found in his words written in 1870: "I am neither German nor French, nor, unless the na

tion is attacked, English. I am European and Cosmopolitan,—for humanity! The nation which shows most worth is the nation I love and reverence." Nearly thirty years later, in one of his very last letters, he writes: "As to our country, if the people were awake, they would submit to be drilled. . . . The fear of imposing drill for at least a year seems to me a forecast of the national tragedy." Conceive what would have been his scorn for those who have shrieked against the duty of imposing national service even now, during these months of deadly peril to all that England stands for and holds dear.

Space fails me to speak of the many hours I have spent in hearing him read his own verse. Among the things I remember particularly his trying on me were those athletic experiments, not, I think, entirely successful, in the accentual treat ment of classical quantitative metres, 'The Fall of Phaëton' and 'Translations from Homer.' I always thought the great ode on France written at the time of her overthrow in 1870, and foretelling for her such a spiritual resurrection as we have now witnessed, perhaps the finest political poem in our language, and was proportionately disappointed with the sense of strain and obscurity produced by the later odes on Napoleon and French history when he read them to me, then fresh written, in 1898. His tones in reading were impressively rotund, resonant, and masterful, but withal level and not much modulated, and in poems so close-packed and complicated in construction, so dense with imagery as these, the sense of what he read was naturally hard to follow. As a rule he courted no criticism and allowed for no difficulty; but one day I remember that he was more indulgent than usual. He paused to say how he knew some people found his poetry obscure, and to ask whether I did, and where, and why? I tried to point out some puzzles in his printed poems which I had failed to solve, even with the page before me and full leisure to study it. But he simply could not see that they were puzzles at all, and closed the talk characteristically with a jolly laugh over the sluggishness of my Saxon wits. In the course of it, defining his own aims and ideals in verse, he repeated several times with in

sistence, "Concentration and suggestion, Colvin, concentration and suggestion, those are the things I care for and am always trying for in poetry." It was a misfortune, I think, for his art, and probably for his hold on posterity, that theory should thus have come to reinforce and exaggerate habits of thought and style to which he was only too prone by instinct.

And so the years went by. Little by little infirmities gathered upon him, till at last he became incapable of walking and received one as a prisoner and a fixture to his armchair. He grew deaf and gradually deafer, so that to contribute any share of one's own to the talk became an effort, and one had more and more to be content with trying to convey to his hearing some suggestion that should stimulate him to monologue. But the intellect remained quite undimmed, the spirit quite unquenchable: his thirst for reading, and especially for French historical and biographical reading, abated not a jot: his interest in politics and literature and persons, the work of his contemporaries and the promise of his juniors, remained as keen as ever. When one succeeded in drawing a monologue it would sometimes be almost as brilliant and well-sustained as those of earlier days. For two years I had for one reason or another failed to see him, when one day in the mid-spring of 1909 came the news of his serious illness, and almost immediately afterwards of his death. It was on a radiant May day, a day of summer rather than spring, that a little company of us, his friends, assembled by his cottage gate and followed his remains to the grave chosen for them in Dorking churchyard. That at least is the material account and external semblance of what happened. What truly, to the inward and spiritual sense, happened on that day has been told by the most devoted of his younger friends, Sir James Barrie, in words as moving as were ever written by one man of letters about another. When the coaches were gone, the cottage, to the unsealed vision, was according to Barrie not deserted. There still sat in his chair, as of yore, an old man, but presently his old age fell away from him ("for this is what is meant by Death to such as he"). He rose and