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;
    No grief nor fate that estranges,
      Nor hope that no life can fulfil,
    But ethereal shelter from ill.

    The coarser delights of the hour
      Tempt, and debauch, and deprave,
    And we joy in a poisonous flower,
      Knowing that nothing can save
    Our flesh from the fate of the grave.

    But sooner or later returning
      In grief to the well-loved nest,
    Our souls filled with infinite yearning,
      We cry, in the past there is rest,
    There is peace, its joys are the best.

    NOSTALGIA