Of art and drink I have had my fill, he declares, and the conclusion of the whole matter is: For the end I know is the best of all. To his mother, to his sister, to Stevenson he writes this recurrent message--the glad tidings of death to come. Man’s life is for him but a child’s wanderings among the shows of a fair: Till at last, Tired of experience he turns To the friendly and comforting breast Of the old nurse, Death. And in most of his poems on this theme it seems to be the peace of the grave he desires, not an immortality of new experiences. There is one moving poem, however, dedicating the “windlestraws” of his verse to his wife in which a reference to their dead child suggests that he, too, may have felt the hunger for immortality: Poor windlestraws On the great, sullen, roaring pool of Time And Chance and Change, I know! But they are yours, as I am, till we attain That end for which we make, we two that are one: A little exquisite Ghost Between us, smiling with the serenest eyes Seen in this world, and calling, calling still In that clear voice whose infinite subtleties Of sweetness, thrilling back across the grave, Break the poor heart to hear: “_Come, Dadsie, come? Mama, how long--how long?_” Sufferer and sensualist, Henley found in the affections some relief from his savage unrest. It was affection that painted that masterly sonnet-portrait of Stevenson in _Apparition_, and there is affection, too, in that song in praise of England, _Pro Rege Nostro_, though much of his praise of England, like his praise of life, is but poetry of lust. Lust in action, unfortunately, has a way of being absurd, and Henley is often absurd in his lustful--by which one does not mean lascivious--poems. His _Song of the Sword_ and his _Song of Speed_ are both a little absurd in their sheer lustfulness. Here we have a mere extravagance of physical exultation, with a great deal of talk about “the Lord,” who is--to the ruin of the verse--a figure of rhetoric and phrase of excitement, and not at all the Holy Spirit of the religious. Henley, indeed, was for the most part not a religious man but an egoist. He saw his own shadow everywhere on the universe, like the shadow of a crippled but undefeated lion. He saw himself sometimes with pity, oftener with pride. One day he found his image in an “old, black rotter of a boat” that lay stranded at Shoreham: With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line, That makes me think of legs and a broken spine.