This is, of its kind, remarkable writing. It may not reflect a poetic view of life, but it reflects a romantic and humorous view. Henley’s humour is seldom good humour: it is, rather, a sort of boisterous invective. His phrases delight us like the oaths of some old sea-captain if we put ourselves in the mood of delight. And how extravagantly he flings them down, like a pocketful of money on the counter of a bar! He may only be a pauper, behaving like a rich man, but we, who are his guests for an hour, submit to the illusion and become happy echoes of his wild talk. For he has the gift of language. It is not the loud-sounding sea but loud-sounding words that are his passion. Compared to Henley, even Tennyson was modest in his use of large Latin negatives. His eloquence is sonorous with the music of “immemorial,” “intolerable,” “immitigable,” “inexorable,” “unimaginable,” and the kindred train of words. He is equally in love with “wonderful,” “magnificent,” “miraculous,” “immortal,” and all the flock of adjectival enthusiasm. Here in this radiant and immortal street, he cries, as he stands on a spring day in Piccadilly. He did not use sounding adjectives without meaning, however. His adjectives express effectively that lust of life that distinguishes him from other writers. For it is lust of life, in contradistinction to love, that is the note of Henley’s work. He himself lets us into this secret in the poem that begins: Love, which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb. Again, when he writes of Piccadilly in spring, he cries: Look how the liberal and transfiguring air Washes this inn of memorable meetings, This centre of ravishments and gracious greetings, Till, through its jocund loveliness of length A tidal-race of lust from shore to shore, A brimming reach of beauty met with strength, It shines and sounds like some miraculous dream, Some vision multitudinous and agleam, Of happiness as it shall be evermore! The spectacle of life produced in Henley an almost exclusively physical excitement. He did not wish to see things transfigured by the light that never was on sea or land. He preferred the light on the wheels of a hansom cab or, at best, the light that falls on the Thames as it flows through London. His attitude to life, in other words, was sensual. He could escape out of circumstances into the sensual enchantments of the _Arabian Nights_, but there was no escape for him, as there is for the great poets, into the general universe of the imagination. This physical obsession may be put down in a measure to his long years of ill-health and struggle. But even a healthy and prosperous Henley, I fancy, would have been restless, dissatisfied, embittered. For him most seas were Dead Seas, and most shores were desolate. The sensualist’s “Dust and Ashes!” breaks in, not always mournfully, but at times angrily, upon the high noon of his raptures. He longs for death as few poets have longed: