and gone which exacts rightfully our highest respect. As one owes him a debt of homage for his fine faithfulness to art, so one thinks of him, as he himself has written of Pater, as a ‘personality withdrawn from action, which it despises or dreads, solitary with its ideals, in the circle of its “exquisite moments” in the Palace of Art, where it is never quite at rest.’ How true that last phrase is, ‘never quite at rest,’ of the author. For to him Art is an escape--the supreme escape from life. Arthur Symons began with a study on Browning and the volume _Days and Nights_ when the eighties were still feeling their way towards the nineties. It was in _Silhouettes_ (1892) and _London Nights_ (1895) that he appeared as perhaps the most _outré_ member of the new movement. His perfection of technique in endeavouring to catch the fleeting impression by limiting it, never cataloguing it, marks the difference of his verse and that of the secession from much of the school of the eighties’ definite listing of facts. Symons, indeed, is not only a poet impressionist, but also a critic impressionist in his critical works like _Studies in Two Literatures_, _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, and so on. This impressionism, whilst it makes his verse so intangible and delicate, also endows his appreciations with a certain all-pervading subtlety. It is as though a poet had begun to see with the Monet vision his own poems. It is as though a man comes away with an impression and is content with that impression on which to base his judgment. It is New Year’s Eve: the poet records his impression of the night: We heard the bells of midnight burying the year. Then the night poured its silent waters over us. And then in the vague darkness faint and tremulous, Time paused; then the night filled with sound; morning was here. The poet is at the Alhambra or Empire Ballet: like an impressionist picture a poem disengages the last fine shade of the scene. He wanders at twilight in autumn through the mist-enfolded lanes: Night creeps across the darkening vale; On the horizon tree by tree Fades into shadowy skies as pale, As moonlight on a shadowy sea. The vision remains like an etching. The poet is on the seashore at sunset: The sea lies quietest beneath The after-sunset flush, That leaves upon the heaped gray clouds The grape’s faint purple blush. It lingers like a water-colour in one’s memory. He sees a girl at a restaurant and his poem is at once an impression as vivid as a painter’s work. In a phrase he can cage a mood, in a quatrain a scene. Where does this ability come from? The answer is, perhaps, given by the one name Verlaine, whose genius Mr. Symons has done so much to hail.