YOUNG WOMAN. Thou art, who hast not been! Pale tunes irresolute And traceries of old sounds Blown from a rotted flute Mingle with noise of cymbals rouged with rust, Nor not strange forms and epicene Lie bleeding in the dust, Being wounded with wounds. For this it is That in thy counterpart Of age-long mockeries Thou hast not been nor art! 

       There seemed to me a certain inconsistency as between the first and last lines of this. I tried, with bent brows, to resolve the discord. But I did not take my failure as wholly incompatible with a meaning in Soames’ mind. Might it not rather indicate the depth of his meaning? As for the craftsmanship, ‘rouged with rust’ seemed to me a fine stroke, and ‘nor not’ instead of ‘and’ had a curious felicity. I wondered who the Young Woman was, and what she had made of it all. I sadly suspect that Soames could not have made more of it than she. Yet, even now, if one doesn’t try to make any sense at all of the poem, and reads it just for the sound, there is a certain grace of cadence. Soames was an artist—in so far as he was anything, poor fellow!     

       It seemed to me, when first I read ‘Fungoids,’ that, oddly enough, the Diabolistic side of him was the best. Diabolism seemed to be a cheerful, even a wholesome, influence in his life.     

                   NOCTURNE. Round and round the shutter’d Square I stroll’d with the Devil’s arm in mine. No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there And the ring of his laughter and mine. We had drunk black wine. I scream’d, ‘I will race you, Master!’       ‘What matter,’ he shriek’d, ‘to-night Which of us runs the faster? There is nothing to fear to-night In the foul moon’s light!’        Then I look’d him in the eyes, And I laugh’d full shrill at the lie he told And the gnawing fear he would fain disguise. It was true, what I’d time and again been told:          He was old—old. 

       There was, I felt, quite a swing about that first stanza—a joyous and rollicking note of comradeship. The second was slightly hysterical perhaps. But I liked the third: it was so bracingly unorthodox, even according to the tenets of Soames’ peculiar sect in the faith. Not much       ‘trusting and encouraging’ here! Soames triumphantly exposing the Devil as a liar, and laughing ‘full shrill,’ cut a quite heartening figure, I    

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