There is more than an echo of Rimbaud’s verses in this volume, and the poet is evidently straining always after the violent effect, the climacteric moment of a mood or passion. Probably two of the most successfully carried through crises are _The Barber_ and _Mishka_. The first of these as a typical example of the whole school I venture to spheterize in full: I dreamed I was a barber; and there went Beneath my hand, oh! manes extravagant. Beneath my trembling fingers, many a mask Of many a pleasant girl. It was my task To gild their hair, carefully, strand by strand; To paint their eyebrows with a timid hand; To draw a bodkin, from a vase of Kohl, Through the closed lashes; pencils from a bowl Of sepia, to paint them underneath; To blow upon their eyes with a soft breath. They lay them back and watched the leaping bands. The dream grew vague, I moulded with my hands The mobile breasts, the valley; and the waist I touched; and pigments reverently placed Upon their thighs in sapient spots and stains, Beryls and chrysolites and diaphanes, And gems whose hot harsh names are never said I was a masseur; and my fingers bled With wonder as I touched their awful limbs. Suddenly, in the marble trough there seems O, last of my pale mistresses, sweetness! A twylipped scarlet pansie. My caress Tinges thy steel-grey eyes to violet, Adown thy body skips the pit-a-pat Of treatment once heard in a hospital For plagues that fascinate, but half appal. So, at the sound, the blood of me stood cold; Thy chaste hair ripened into sullen gold; Thy throat, the shoulders, swelled and were uncouth; The breasts rose up and offered each a mouth; And on the belly, pallid blushes crept, That maddened me, until I laughed and wept. Here we have a long amorous catalogue. It is the catalogue age which comes via Oscar Wilde’s _Sphinx_ and _Salomé_ from certain French writers. But this does not make up for the singing power of the poet, and in long poems it becomes singularly laborious. However, this phase of poetry is so typical of the age that it is as well to have dealt with it before turning to the essentially ‘singing’ poets of the period, Dowson and Davidson.