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 like someone one knows, whom one wants to talk to tenderly, touch in a friendly way, and say as little as possible. He comes to one humanly first, and asks you for your eye to his verse afterward, something of the "Little boy Lost", in his so ineffectual face, weak with sweetness and hidden in shyness, covered with irresponsibility, or lack of power to be responsible. He was a helpless one, that is certain. He resorted to the old-fashioned methods of the decadents for maintaining the certain requisite melancholy apparently necessary to sing a certain way. In the struggle of that period, he must have seemed like a very clear, though a very sad singer. There were no lilies or orchids in his buttonhole, and no strange jewels on his fingers, for you remember, it was the time of "Monsieur Phocas", and the art of Gustave Moreau. He was plain and sincere, and pathetic, old-fashioned too in that he was bohemian, or at least had acquired bohemianism, for I think no Englishman was ever really bohemian. Dieppe and the docks had gotten him, and took away the sense of mastery over things that a real poet of power must somehow have. He was essentially a giver-in. His neurasthenia was probably the reason for that. It was the age of absinthe and little taverns, for there was Verlaine and the inimitable Cafe d'Harcourt, which, as you saw it just before the war, had the very something that kept the Master at his drinks all day.