his art, and the mysterious dash into a world where only a strange intellect knows how to enjoy the material warmth and human softness. It is perfectly outrageous to call him a materialist; he made himself able, through the very virtue of material, to enter straightway into the heart of spirituality; it is more proper to say that he alone found the right meeting ground of spirit and material. He never could think anything spiritual apart from form and colour; the form and colour were divine themselves in his thought. They were at once the symbol of what they represented in spirit; he could not think of them merely as form and colour. He was, in that respect, quite Oriental.
If he had one great fault as a poet, it was that he always knew, too well indeed, what he was going to write; he could never forget himself. I do not think it was from his over-consciousness of his critical power; it may be that he could not become so bold to trust only in his impulse, or that his own art, he thought, was not a thing to play with, but to respect with all his heart. His intellect was too noble to forget the imagination; what appeared quite
