But still my heart with rapture fills, And dances with the cotton-mills: but you felt the thing was going too far when you came across a poem called “Sky-writing,” which opened: My heart leaps up when I behold An advert in the sky. I used to have the book, but I have lost it; it was full of things like that. And then, of course, there was the Futurist school, which ran into all sorts of extremes; but none more curious, I think, than the “Page-decorating” group of writers, who said that neither sense nor grammar nor even sound counted for anything in poetry; an immediate, telling effect ought to be produced by the mere look of the letters on the page. I can give an example of it from an old album of mine: it is no use trying to make head or tail of it, but if you look at it with your eyes half-shut, so to speak, you can just see that the first verse contains pretty and the second contains ugly letters, or groups of letters: St. Just-in-Roseland! St. Just-in-Roseland! All vervein, desirable vervein, and melilot. Here veined agrimony swoons, with fumes calamitous, daintily; Arable fallows assoil sly fingers; Purple woofs incarnate of swishy meadows, Dilapidated obloquies amorously urgent, all anyhow, wayward fingers, Transience unimaginably rapid, Languorous ditties, that opiates inhibit, Rosy anodynes, albeit rigorously voluble, Alcantara! Kircudbright! Gutted offsets, bombastic in groping hot-houses, endways: Fungoid sprockets, puddle-bedripped, ungainly, Rectitudes, angularly awkward, perspectives, Elucubrate dross, grinning potsherds, warps, Stinking of frogs, knock-kneed scorpion gargoyles, Wreathed mouthings of something quarrelsome, brutish, Newts hag-ridden, huddled responsibilities, Spawn umbellated, coughing, slobbering, Heckmondwike! Perhaps it was time the neo-classical school came along to give us a new lead! But of course it was far more of a revolution in Art than it was in letters. I am afraid I am a very poor first-hand witness about the artistic movements of my time, for the old painters used to expect such a lot of you! They exhibited, of course, at the Academy and other accessible places every now and then, but even so it was rather trying to have the artists standing on guard, as they always did, and explaining to the sight-seer, not what their pictures were about, but what sort of emotions they ought to evoke! Some of them went further, and said you must not look at their pictures unless you were fasting, or unless you had recently taken opium. (Opium-smoking was not as common then as it is now, but already you were sometimes offered it in Chelsea.) I was too busy in one way and another to devote my life to picture-inspecting; and indeed, it was only a small group of people who took any interest in painting at all.