clusive of intelligence, he took the book out of my hand and read the opening lines of Queen Mab. I asked him to read them a second time and then a third time, so that I might commit them to memory; and having repeated some three or four lines correctly I begged that the book should be given back to me, for I would read to him The Pine Forest by the Sea. He gave a hearing to about half the poem and then resumed his shaving, remarking, with a view to discouraging me with my poet, that he could not understand why I should take so much pleasure in reading bad verses. Yet he was not indifferent to poetry, and to persuade me to read better verses he recited the beautiful lines from Christabel:

The night is chill; the forest bare;
Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?
There is not wind enough in the air
To move away the ringlet curl

From the lovely lady's cheek

But it was not the lady's curl that moved me to cry:
Father, how beautiful! but:

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

Lines whose beauty never grows less but is increased perhaps by association with the moment when I heard them for the first time-my beloved father laying down his hair brushes, restoring the stoppers

to the vials of macassar-oil and the top to the pomatum pot.

And the sight of a name having discovered a great poet to me, I sought for another name betokening poetry. The name Kirke White seemed to herald a poet, although not so great a poet as the name Percy Bysshe Shelley; I am quite sure I did not place the same reliance on the name of Kirke White as I had done on the name of Percy Bysshe Shelley, but I did not doubt that it signified poetry, and the bookseller in Castlebar was written to many times, importuned till at last a letter came from him saying that he hoped to receive the book by the next post. The market cart went to Castlebar once a week, but my longing for Kirke White could not brook so long a delay; a special messenger was engaged by me to walk sixteen miles for the book; he started earlya shilling was the fare-and at five o'clock I was awaiting his arrival in the pantry, putting my father's valet past his patience with tiresome inquiries and excursions to the head of the kitchen stairs. At last the messenger's nailed shoes were heard on the stone stairs, but I did not give him time to reach the top. I called that the volume should be handed to me over the banisters, and snatching it, I fled with it to my room, bolting the door after me, so afraid was I of an interruption. But how shall I tell of the great sickness of heart that fell upon me, how I walked in despondency for the first time, my hope being, and it was only a very faint one, that I should discover a poet behind the name of Abraham Cow

ley, the second string to my bow. . . . Byron pleased me, but only fairly well. I liked the passages my father pointed out to me and committed some pages of Sardanapalus to memory out of deference to his judgment, feeling, however, that they lacked, for me at least, the spiritual ecstasy which at that time I was so intent on finding, which I sought and found in many poets, but in none so flagrantly as I did in Shelley.

We often went to Castle Carra for picnics, and I think it has been mentioned in some autobiographical works that the old gateway always excited my mother to recite a passage from Marmion. The descent of the portcullis as Marmion galloped through, shearing away a plume from his crest, annoyed me, but I was obliged to refrain from criticism, for I was without power to translate my feelings into words. I was often reluctant to listen to my father reading The Lay of the Last Minstrel; in truth I liked it no better than Marmion and detested the volume of Burke's speeches which he urged me to read in the billiard room. But this, too, has been related in one of the volumes of Hail and Farewell, so I will stop on the admission that no further attempt was made to educate me. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one I read most of the English poets, and when I was twenty-five my love of poetry began to wilt in Les Orientales, Les Feuilles d'Automne, Les Contemplations; and La Légende des Siècles carried with it the dismal conviction that I had lost my taste for poetry. Something has broken in me,

I said; can it be else, for here is beautiful poetry, and I can distinguish in it no more than sonorous versification.

Balzac opened up a new world to me, a world of things, and in Balzac I found a poem so beautiful that I began to think that perhaps my love of poetry was not as dead as I thought it was. . . . But I must not detain the reader from the sonnet:

LA TULIPE

Moi, je suis la tulipe, une fleur de Hollande
Et telle est ma beauté que l'avare Flamand
Paye un de mes oignons plus cher qu'un diamant,
Si mes fonds sont bien purs, si je suis droite et
grande.

Mon air est féodal, et, comme une Yolande
Dans sa jupe à longs plis étoffée amplement,
Je porte des blasons peints sur mon vêtement
Gueules fascées d'argent, or avec pourpre en bande

Le jardinier divin a filé de ses doigts.

Les rayons du soleil et la pourpre des rois
Pour me faire une robe à trame douce et fine.

Nulle fleur du jardin n'égale ma splendeur,
Mais la nature, hélas! n'a pas versé d'odeur
Dans mon calice fait comme un vase de Chine.

Fait comme un vase de Chine is a signature, and in the words Si je suis droite et grande the tulip is heard speaking, and again in the words Mon air est féodal. And if Balzac had not included two other samples

of Lucien de Rubempré's poetic genius and Gautier had not spoken, La Tulipe might have gone down the centuries as the subject of an everlasting controversy; but the two other samples he printed, one by Madame de Girardin (the authorship of the third has slipped my memory), wear such a pale, keepsake air that suspicion could have hardly failed to gather in the minds of the least wary. All poetry was equally indifferent to Balzac. Gautier, in his great portrait, quotes a line remarkable for three mistakes. in French prosody; one mistake, two mistakes, but three mistakes in a single line is a unique achievement. Gautier led me to Mendès (Judith Gautier was the whilom wife of Mendès), and Mendès began my initiation into French poetry by putting Villon into my hands. I was always alive to the beauty of the world and needed but one beautiful sonnet to recover myself, and my own dear self I found in Villon's ballade to his mother. The old woman, I said, will live as long as the French language; her son's verses preserve her better than spices, essences, oils, and the many various swaddles of Egyptian undertakers. And the fair helm-maker will live, and with a life as intense-but why helmmaker? As there is nothing in the poem to show that the old woman got her living by making helmets, and as Villon's poems are usually about lights-oflove, we may assume that the phrase is but a figure of speech. The meaning, however, of the title need not detain us; it is enough for us to know that despite the disapproval expressed over their garden walls