Among many other ambitions, Davidson wanted to fire the scientific world with imaginative poetry. As he phrased it: ‘Science is still a valley of dead bones till imagination breathes upon it.’ There are indeed evidences of an almost Shelleyan pantheism in his credo. Unhappy was his life, but, probably, he did not labour in vain, for a handsel of his song will endure. Writing, indeed, was the consolation of his life: I cannot write, I cannot think; ’Tis half delight and half distress; My memory stumbles on the brink Of some unfathomed happiness-- Of some old happiness divine, What haunting scent, what haunting note, What word, or what melodious line, Sends my heart throbbing to my throat? Indeed, why repeat it, both Dowson and he will live by their poetry. But in the case of Davidson, in addition, there is his rather elephantine humour. While again it must always be remembered that he had the courage to state that the fear of speaking freely had ‘cramped the literature of England for a century.’ It was the liberty of the French literature indeed that in no small degree captivated the minds of all these young men. Very few of them, however, had the courage to speak freely. But it must always remain to Davidson’s credit that he tried to write a freer, emancipated novel, which, however, he failed to do, because he had a very remote idea of novel construction. It was in 1896 that the quaint little salmon-pink volume of William Theodore Peters, the young American poet, appeared, entitled _Posies out of Rings_. This young American was an intimate of some of the men of the nineties, and though it is doubtful whether he himself would have ever achieved high fame as a poet, he had a sincere love for the beautiful things of Art. Among all these tragedies of ill-health, insanity and suicide that seemed to track down each of these young men, his fate was perhaps the saddest of all, for he died of starvation in Paris,[17] where many of his verses had appeared in a distinctly American venture, _The Quartier Latin_. His volume of conceits are a harking back, not always satisfactorily, to the ancient form of the versified epigram. What was wrong with his Muse is that it was only half alive. He puts indeed his own case in a nutshell in that charming little poem _Pierrot and the Statue_, which I venture to quote in full: [17] R. H. Sherard, _Twenty Years in Paris_. One summer evening in a charméd wood, Before a marble Venus, Pierrot stood; A Venus beautiful beyond compare, Gracious her lip, her snowy bosom bare, Pierrot amorous, his cheeks aflame, Called the white statue many a lover’s name. An oriole flew down from off a tree, ‘Woo not a goddess made of stone!’ sang he. ‘All of my warmth to warm it,’ Pierrot said, When by the pedestal he sank down dead; The statue faintly flushed, it seemed to strive To move--_but it was only half alive_.