nt may be an image of the whole, the moon's still scarce crumbled
image, as it were, in a glass of wine. He would be, and have all poets be,
a true epitome of the whole mass, a Herrick and Dr. Johnson in the same
body and because this--not so difficult before the Mermaid closed its
door--is no longer possible, his work lacks music, is abstract, as even an
actor's movement can be when the thought of doing is plainer to his mind
than the doing itself: the straight line from cup to lip, let us say, more
plain than the hand's own sensation weighed down by that heavy spillable
cup. I think he was content, when he had called before our eyes--before
the too understanding eyes of his chosen crowd--the violent burly man that
he had dreamed, content with the mere suggestion, and so did not work long
enough at his verses. He disliked Victor Hugo as much as he did Rossetti,
and yet Rossetti's translation from _Les Burgraves_, because of its mere
technical mastery, out-sings Henley in his own song--

"My mother is dead; God's patience wears;
It seems my Chaplain will not have done.
Love on: who cares?
Who cares? Love on."

I can read his poetry with emotion, but I read it for some glimpse of what
he might have been as Border balladist, or Cavalier, or of what he
actually was, not as poet but as man. He had what Wilde lacked, even in
his ruin, passion, was maybe as passionate as some great man of action, as
Parnell, let us say. When he and Stevenson quarrelled, he cried over it
with some woman or other, and his notorious article was but for vengeance
upon Mrs. Stevenson, who had arranged for the public eye, what he
considered an imaginary figure, with no resemblance to the gay companion
who had founded his life, to that life's injury, upon "The august, the
immortal musketeers." She had caused the quarrel, as he believed, and now
she had robbed him over again, by blotting from the world's memory the
friend of his youth; and because he believed it I read those angry
paragraphs with but deeper sympathy for the writer; and I think that the
man who has left them out of Henley's collected writings has wronged his
memory, as Mrs. Stevenson wronged the memory of Stevenson.

He was no contemplative man, no pleased possessor of wooden models and
paper patterns, but a great passionate man, and no friend of his would
have him pictured otherwise. I saw little of him in later years, but I
doubt if he was ever the same aft