Cherished, as I imagine, first only in the
abstract, this search after the immature, the ripening graces which time
can only spoil in the ripening, found itself at the journey's end, as some
of his friends thought, a little prematurely. I was never of their opinion.
I only saw twice, and for a few moments only, the young girl to whom most
of his verses were to be written, and whose presence in his life may be
held to account for much of that astonishing contrast between the broad
outlines of his life and work. The situation seemed to me of the most
exquisite and appropriate impossibility. The daughter of a refugee, I
believe of good family, reduced to keeping a humble restaurant in a foreign
quarter of London, she listened to his verses, smiled charmingly, under her
mother's eyes, on his two years' courtship, and at the end of two years
married the waiter instead. Did she ever realise more than the obvious part
of what was being offered to her, in this shy and eager devotion? Did it
ever mean very much to her to have made and to have killed a poet? She had,
at all events, the gift of evoking, and, in its way, of retaining, all that
was most delicate, sensitive, shy, typically poetic, in a nature which I
can only compare to a weedy garden, its grass trodden down by many feet,
but with one small, carefully tended flowerbed, luminous with lilies.
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