too, who walked and listened, for he had become, I think, to all
his fellow students, sacred, as the fool is sacred in the East. We copied
the model laboriously, but he would draw without research into the natural
form, and call his study "St. John in the Wilderness"; but I can remember
the almost scared look and the half-whisper of a student, now a successful
sculptor, who said, pointing to the modelling of a shoulder, "That is too
easy, a great deal too easy!" For with brush and pencil he was too
coherent.

We derided each other, told absurd tales to one another's discredit, but
we never derided him, or told tales to his discredit. He stood outside the
sense of comedy his friend John Eglinton has called "the social cement" of
our civilization; and we would "gush" when we spoke of him, as men do when
they praise something incomprehensible. But when he painted there was no
difficulty in comprehending. How could that ease and rapidity of
composition, so far beyond anything that we could attain to, belong to a
man whose words seemed often without meaning?

A few months before I had come to Ireland he had sent me some verses,
which I had liked till Edwin Ellis had laughed me from my liking by
proving that no line had a rhythm that agreed with any other, and that,
the moment one thought he had settled upon some scheme of rhyme, he would
break from it without reason. But now his verse was clear in thought and
delicate in form. He wrote without premeditation or labour. It had, as it
were, organized itself, and grown as nervous and living as if it had, as
Dante said of his own work, paled his cheek. The Society he belonged to
published a little magazine, and he had asked the readers to decide
whether they preferred his prose or his verse, and it was because they so
willed it that he wrote the little transcendental verses afterwards
published in _Homeward Songs by the Way_.

Life was not expensive in that house, where, I think, no meat was eaten; I
know that out of the sixty or seventy pounds a year which he earned as
accountant in a Dublin shop, he saved a considerable portion for his
private charity; and it was, I think, his benevolence that gave him his
lucidity of speech, and, perhaps, of writing. If he convinced himself that
any particular activity was desirable in the public interest or in that of
his friends, he had at once the ardour that came to another from personal
ambition. He was always surrounded with a little g