fastidious in their rejection of mere nature, when it comes too nakedly or
too clamorously into sight and hearing, and so gratefully content with a
few choice things faultlessly done.

And Dowson, in his verse (the "Verses" of 1896, "The Pierrot of the
Minute," a dramatic phantasy in one act, of 1897, the posthumous volume
"Decorations"), was the same scrupulous artist as in his prose, and more
felicitously at home there. He was quite Latin in his feeling for youth,
and death, and "the old age of roses," and the pathos of our little hour
in which to live and love; Latin in his elegance, reticence, and simple
grace in the treatment of these motives; Latin, finally, in his sense of
their sufficiency for the whole of one's mental attitude. He used the
commonplaces of poetry frankly, making them his own by his belief in them:
the Horatian Cynara or Neobule was still the natural symbol for him when he
wished to be most personal. I remember his saying to me that his ideal of a
line of verse was the line of Poe:

"The viol, the violet, and the vine";

and the gracious, not remote or unreal beauty, which clings about such
words and such images as these, was always to him the true poetical beauty.
There never was a poet to whom verse came more naturally, for the song's
sake; his theories were all aesthetic, almost technical ones, such as a
theory, indicated by his preference for the line of Poe, that the letter
"v" was the most beautiful of the letters, and could never be brought into
verse too often. For any more abstract theories he had neither tolerance
nor need. Poetry as a philosophy did not exist for him; it existed solely
as the loveliest of the arts. He loved the elegance of Horace, all that was
most complex in the simplicity of Poe, most birdlike in the human melodies
of Verlaine. He had the pure lyric gift, unweighted or unballasted by any