M. Mallarmé, who understands English so perfectly, has perhaps seen the poems of Sydney Dobell. He knows, it is possible, that thirty or forty years ago there was an English poet who cultivated the symbol, who deliquesced the language, as he himself does in French. Sydney Dobell wrote lovely, unintelligible things, that broke, every now and then, into rhapsodies of veritable beauty. But his whole system was violent. He became an eccentric cometary nebula, whirling away from our poetic system at a tangent. He whirled away, for all his sincere passion, into oblivion. This is what one fears for the Symbolists: that being read with so great an effort by their own generation, they may, by the next, not be read at all, and what is pure and genuine in their artistic impulses be lost. Something of M. Mallarmé will, however, always be turned back to with respect and perhaps with enthusiasm, for he is a true man of letters. _1893._ TWO PASTELS I Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet A pretty little anthology might be made of poems by distinguished writers who never for a moment professed to be poets, and who only "swept, with hurried hand, the strings" when they thought nobody was listening. The elegant technical people of the eighteenth century, who never liked to be too abstruse to seem polite, would contribute a great many of these flowers that were born to bloom unseen. It is not everybody who is aware that the majestic Sir William Blackstone was "guilty," as people put it, of a set of one hundred octosyllabic verses which would do credit to any laurelled master on Parnassus. We might, indeed, open our little volume with _The Lawyers Farewell to his Muse_. Then, of course, there would be Bishop Berkeley's unique poem, _Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way_; and Oldys, the antiquary, would spare us his _Busy, curious, thirsty Fly_. We should appeal to Burton for the prefatory verses in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and to Bacon for _The World's Bubble_. If I had any finger in that anthology, Smollett's _Ode to Leven Water_ should by no means be omitted. It would be a false pride that would reject Holcroft's _Gaffer Gray_, or Sydney Smith's _Receipt for a Salad_, which latter Herrick might have been glad to sign. Hume's solitary poem should be printed by itself, or with some of Carlyle's lyrics, and George Eliot's sonnets, in an appendix, as an awful warning.