e is
another characteristic glimpse in one of Stevenson's letters, a picture
of Henley sitting up in his hospital bed, his hair and beard all
tangled, "talking as cheerfully as if he had been in a King's palace, or
the great King's palace of the blue air."

His interest in life was far too large and all-embracing for him to be
indifferent to the smallest or most insignificant part of it. He had
none of the disdain for everyday details, none of the fear of the
commonplace that oppresses many men who think themselves great. Nothing
that lived came amiss to his philosophy or his pleasure. He could talk
as brilliantly upon the affairs of the kitchen as upon those of state,
he could appreciate gossip as well as verse, he could laugh over an
absurdity as easily as he could extol the masterpiece. Romance for him
was everywhere--in the slang of the cockney of the Strand as in a
symphony by Berlioz, in 'Arriet's feathers as in the "Don Diegos" of the
Prado--the mere sound of the title in his mouth became a tribute to the
master he honoured above most--in the patter of the latest Lion-comique
of the Halls as in the prose of Meredith or Borrow, in the disreputable
cat stealing home through the dull London dawn as in the Romanticists
emerging from the chill of Classicism--in everything, big and little, in
which he felt the life so dear to him throbbing.

And he loved always the visible sign through which the appeal came. I
have seen him lean, spell-bound, from our windows on a blue summer
night, thrilled by the presence out there of Cleopatra's Needle, the
pagan symbol flaunting its slenderness against river and sky, while in
the distance the dome of St. Paul's, the Christian symbol, hung a
phantom upon the heavens. His pleasure in the friendship of men of rank
and family might have savoured of snobbishness had not one understood
how much they stood for to him as symbols. I am sure he could fancy
himself with these friends that same King of Babylon who thrills in the
lover of his poem. I used to think that for him all the drama of
_Admiral Guinea_, one of the plays he wrote with Stevenson, was
concentrated in the tap-tap of the blind man's stick. In his _Hospital
Verses_, his _London Voluntaries_, his every _Rhyme_ and _Rhythm_, the
outward sign is the expression of the emotion, the thought that is in
him. And coming down to more ordinary matters--ordinary, that is, to
most people--I shall never forget, once when I was in Spain an