Mr. Swinburne was seated in an arbour of roses, clothed in a gold dalmatic, a birthday gift from his British Peers.  Their names were embroidered in pearls on the border.  I asked permission to read my address:—­

   There beats no heart by Cam or Isis
      (Where tides of poets ebb and flow),
   But guards Dolores as a crisis
      Of long ago.

   A crisis bringing fire and wonder,
      A gift of some dim Eastern Mage,
   A firework still smouldering under
      The feet of middle age.

   For you could love and hate and tell us
      Of almost everything,
   You made our older poets jealous,
      For you alone could sing.

   In truth it was your splendid praises
      Which made us wake
   To glories hidden in the phrases
      Of William Blake.

   No boy who sows his metric salads
      His tamer oats,
   But always steals from Swinburne’s ballads
      The stronger notes.

‘Do you play golf?’ said Mr. Swinburne, handing me two little spheres such as are used in the royal game.  And I heard no more; for I received a blow—­whether delivered by Mr. Swinburne or the ungrateful Theodormon I do not know, but I found myself falling down the gulf of oblivion, and suddenly, with a dull thud, I landed on the remains of Howlglass.  The softness of his head had really preserved me from what might have been a severe shock, because the distance from Parnassus to Fleet Street, as you know, is considerable, and the escalade might have been more serious.  I reached my rooms in Half Moon Street, however, having seen only one star, with just a faint nostalgia for the realms into which for one brief day I was privileged to peep.

(1906.)

A MISLAID POET.

In the closing years of my favourite last century, when poetry was more discussed than it is now (at all events as a marketable commodity), few verse-writers were overlooked.  Bosola’s observation about ’the neglected poets of your time’ could not be quoted with any propriety.  Mr. John Lane would make long and laborious journeys on the District Railway, armed bag-a-pied, in order to discover the new and unpublished.  Now he has shot over all the remaining preserves; laurels and bays, so necessary for the breed ‘of men and women over-wrought,’ have withered in the London soot.  There was one bright creature, however, who escaped his rifle; she was brought down by another sportsman, and thus missed some of the fame which might have attached to her had she been trussed and hung in the Bodley Head.  Poaching in the library at Thelema, I came across her by accident.  Her song is not without significance.

In 1878 Georgiana Farrer mentioned on page 190 of her Miscellaneous Poems, ‘I am old by sin entangled;’ but this was probably a pious exaggeration.  Only some one young and intellectually very vigorous could have penned her startling numbers.  I suggest that she retained more of her youth than, from religious motives, she thought it proper to admit.  In the ’eighties, when incense was burned in drawing-rooms, and people were talking about ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ she could write of Paradise:—­