ed close a period that was distinguished all over the world,
the period of the sunflower. Apart from its wildest and most
spectacular genius, it has produced Lionel Johnson with his religious
purity, and Aubrey Beardsley. It was the time of sad and delicate
young men. They all died in boyhood really. These were, I think, with
Dowson the best it offered. We never read Arthur Symons for his power
in verse, he with so much of the rose-tinted afterglow in him, so much
of the old feeling for stage doors and roses thrown from the boxes,
and the dying scent of lingerie. His essays will be a far finer source
of delight for a much longer time, for therein is the best poetry he
had to offer.

Dowson was, let us say not mockingly, the boyish whimperer in song. He
was ineffectual, too much so, to take up the game of laughter for
long. That would have been too strenuous for him, so he had to sit and
weep tears of wordy rain. "Il pleut dans mon coeur" was the famous
touch of his master, it was the loudest strain in him. That was the
lover-strain, and Dowson was the lover dying of love, imaginary love
probably, and saw everywhere something to remind him of what he had
pathetically lost. If there had been a little savage in him, he would
have walked away with what he wanted. He maybe did have a try or two,
but they couldn't have endured, for he wasn't loving a particular
Adelaide. That was the name he gave to love, for it was woman's lips,
and eyes and hands that he cared most for, or at least seemed most to
care.

It was in the vision that crossed his ways in the dark and boisterous
taverns where love finds strange ways for expression, that the
singleness of feeling possessed him. It was among the rougher elements
of dock life that his refinements found their level. Dowson sang and
sang and sang, until he grew old at thirty-three, "worn out by what
was never really life to him". Aged pierrot, gone home to his mother,
the Moon, to bask forever in the twilight of his old and vague
fancies. There might he strum his heart out in the old way, and the
world would never hear, for it has lost the ear for this kind of song.
Perhaps in two hundred years, in other "golden treasuries" there may
appear the songs of Dowson as among the best of those early and late
singers of the nineteenth century. We cannot say now, for it cloys a
little with sweets for us at this time, though it was then the time of
honey and jasmine, and the scent of far away