ut his painting, which did not interest me,
showed no influence but that of Leighton. He had started perhaps a couple
of years too late for Pre-Raphaelite influence, for no great
Pre-Raphaelite picture was painted after 1870, and left England too soon
for that of the French painters. He was, however, sometimes moving as a
poet and still more often an astonishment. I have known him cast something
just said into a dozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing
to talk; but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and my
father thought he lacked all ambition. Yet he had at times nobility of
rhythm--an instinct for grandeur, and after thirty years I still repeat to
myself his address to Mother Earth--

"O mother of the hills, forgive our towers,
O mother of the clouds forgive our dreams."

And there are certain whole poems that I read from time to time or try to
make others read. There is that poem where the manner is unworthy of the
matter, being loose and facile, describing Adam and Eve fleeing from
Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she carries so carefully, and Eve replies
that it is a little of the apple-core kept for their children. There is
that vision concerning _Christ the Less_, a too hurriedly written ballad,
where the half of Christ sacrificed to the divine half "that fled to seek
felicity" wanders wailing through Golgotha, and there is _The Saint and
the Youth_, in which I can discover no fault at all. He loved
complexities--"Seven silences like candles round her face" is a line of
his--and whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner which I would
have known from that of any other poet. He would say to me, "I am a
mathematician with the mathematics left out"--his father was a great
mathematician--or "A woman once said to me, 'Mr Ellis, why are your poems
like sums?'" And certainly he loved symbols and abstractions. He said
once, when I had asked him not to mention something or other, "Surely you
have discovered by this time that I know of no means whereby I can mention
a fact in conversation."

He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre-Raphaelite studios, and early
in our acquaintance put into my hands a scrap of notepaper on which he had
written some years before an interpretation of the poem that begins

"The fields from Islington to Marylebone,
To Primrose Hill and St. John's Wood,
Were builded over with pillars of gold,
And there Jerusalem's pillars stood."

T