When in Swinburne’s second chorus in Atalanta in Calydon Phillips came to the lines
He weaves, and is clothed with derision,
Sows, and he shall not reap,
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep,
with the last word “sleep,” as it came from Stephen Phillips’s lips, the very world itself seemed to close tired eyes, to wander away into unconsciousness, and finally to fall on sleep.
James Russell Lowell once said that if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his voice shall but seem the nobler, for the sublime criticism of ocean; and the words recall Stephen Phillips to me as I write, for in his voice, when he was deeply stirred by poetry, there was something measured, unhasting, majestic, like the vastness of great waters, moving in flood of full tide under the moon.
I have tried to give the reader some idea of his rendering of poetry, and I have failed, for, as I have already said, it cannot be described. Some godlike spirit, outside himself, seemed, in these supreme and consecrated hours, suddenly to possess him, and, when the hour and the consecration were past, as suddenly to leave him. But, while that hour lasted, there was only one word for Stephen Phillips, poet, and that word was Genius.
EDWARD WHYMPER
AS I KNEW HIM
I
Though I head this article “Edward Whymper as I Knew Him,” I prefer first to write of Edward Whymper as he was before I knew him—or rather before he knew me. In the town where he and I were then living he had been dubbed “Bradlaugh turned Baedeker” by one resident who insisted on Whymper’s likeness to the late Charles Bradlaugh, and was aware that the Great Mountaineer had written various “Guides.” Another name by which he was known was “The Sphinx,” possibly because of his silence, his aloofness, and the mystery with which he was supposed to surround himself. To the good folk of the town he was indeed always something of an enigma. In the street he stalked straightforwardly along, looking only in front of him, set of mouth, stony of eye and severe of brow, if anyone either spoke to, or stared at him. On the journey up to London, when most people read their morning paper, he was rarely seen with a newspaper in his hand, but stared, pipe in mouth, out of the window, except when going through proofs or working at papers which he produced from a black leather bag, without which he was never seen in the train. On the journey down, when work for the day was done, his would-be sociable fellow passengers found Whymper taciturn and reticent, responding, or rather not responding, to any conversational advance, if possible, in a monosyllable.