It was in the vision that crossed his ways in the dark and boisterous taverns where love finds strange ways for expression, that the singleness of feeling possessed him. It was among the rougher elements of dock life that his refinements found their level. Dowson sang and sang and sang, until he grew old at thirty-three, "worn out by what was never really life to him". Aged pierrot, gone home to his mother, the Moon, to bask forever in the twilight of his old and vague fancies. There might he strum his heart out in the old way, and the world would never hear, for it has lost the ear for this kind of song. Perhaps in two hundred years, in other "golden treasuries" there may appear the songs of Dowson as among the best of those early and late singers of the nineteenth century. We cannot say now, for it cloys a little with sweets for us at this time, though it was then the time of honey and jasmine, and the scent of far away flowers. Pierrot of the glass, with the hours dripping away in fine, gold rain. That was the genius of poets like Dowson, and pierrot was the master of them all. HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE Henry James on Rupert Brooke! Here is certainly a very wide interval, separated, artist and subject, by the greatest divergence of power, and one may be even amazed at the contrast involved. He is surely, James, in all his elaborateness, trying to square the rose and compute the lily, algebraical advances upon a most simple thesis. Brooke--a nature so obvious, which had no measure at all for what the sum had done to him, and for all that about him, or for those stellar ecstasies which held him bound with fervour as poet, planetary swimmer, and gifted as well with a fine stroke for the sea, and runner of all the beautiful earth places about the great seas' edge. For me, there is heaviness and over-elaboration paramount in this preface to the Letters from America, excess of byword, a strained relationship with his subject, but that would of course be Jamesian, and very naturally, too. It is hardly, this preface, the tribute of the wise telling of beautiful and "blinding youth", surely more the treatise of the problemist forging his problem, as the sculptor might; something too much of metal or stone, too ponderous, too severe let one say, for its so gracing and brightening theme, something not springing into bloom, as does the person and personality of the young subject himself. Only upon occasion does he really come upon the young man, actual, forgetful of all but him.