Yet he had at times
nobility of rhythm--an instinct for grandeur--and after thirty
years I still repeat to myself his address to Mother Earth:
O mother of the hills, forgive our towers;
O mother of the clouds, forgive our dreams
and there are certain whole poems that I read from time to time or
try to make others read. There is that poem where the manner is
unworthy of the matter, being loose and facile, describing Adam
and Eve fleeing from Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she carries so
carefully and Eve replies that it is a little of the apple core
kept for their children. There is that vision of 'Christ the
Less,' a too hurriedly written ballad, where the half of Christ,
sacrificed to the divine half 'that fled to seek felicity,'
wanders wailing through Golgotha; and there is 'The Saint and the
Youth' in which I can discover no fault at all. He loved
complexities--'seven silences like candles round her face' is a
line of his--and whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner,
which I would have known from that of any other poet. He would say
to me, 'I am a mathematician with the mathematics left out'--his
father was a great mathematician--or 'A woman once said to me,
"Mr.
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