We have all met young people who give us that--beautiful, brilliant, lovely natured, so superabundant in all their qualities (and particularly perhaps in some quality of emanating light)--as to make them suggest the supernatural, and touched, too, with the finger of a moonlight that has written “fated” upon their brows. Probably our feeling is nothing more mysterious than our realisation that temperaments so vital and intense must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less wild winged. Above all, this young gentleman was the portrait of a poet, even (in those days) of the type of literary sophistication which is (or was) called decadent! There was about him a perceptible aroma of literary self-consciousness. He had begun to contribute to magazines and newspapers the verses which he soon gathered into a first volume, “A Summer of Love” (an “author’s book,” as the trade term has it), verses patently derivative in character (as whose early verses are not?), showing the influences of various masters. He had already become a bit of a celebrity, arriving at twenty-five in _Who’s Who_. In conversation he spoke with striking fluency and precision, and a rather amusing effect of authority; all of which, together with a ready command, rather incongruous for his years, of very apt words little employed in speech, gave a general impression, I fancy, of something of an infant prodigy. He wrote in a letter of this time of the poems of Coventry Patmore: I have come to regard them with intense admiration. Have you read them? Patmore seems to me to be a greater poet than Francis Thompson. (Kilmer, had by the way, just given a lecture at Columbia University on Francis Thompson.) He has not the rich vocabulary, the decorative erudition, the Shelleyan enthusiasm, which distinguish the “Sister Songs” and the “Hound of Heaven,” but he has a classical simplicity, a restraint and sincerity which make his poems satisfying. Some of his shorter poems, such as “Alexander and Lycon” and “The Toys,” approach Landor in their Greek economy. Of course, the “Angel in the House,” and many other of his poems, are marred by Tennysonian influences. But the “Unknown Eros” is a work of stupendous beauty. It is certainly supreme among modern religious poems. That part of it devoted to Eros and Psyche is remarkably daring and remarkably fine. Psyche symbolizes the soul, and Eros the love of God. Their amour is described with realistic minuteness, even with humorous flippancy, and yet the whole poem is alive with religious feeling. The finding of Patmore, by the way, was what might be called a finger-post in Kilmer’s life. The fortunate introduction was performed by, it is my impression, Kilmer’s friend Thomas Walsh.