But you have at times (I read it so) insisted on your impressions. That is, you have put on your cap, sharpened your pencil, and gone afield as the Impressionistic poet. Come and hear more. I will give you a Crown and a bit of the whip—the smallest bit.
Give my warm regards to your wife.
Yours ever,
George Meredith.
May 18, 1891.
Dear Will,
I got the copy you sent me of Sospiri di Roma.... Your nature feeling is always so intense and genuine that I would have liked my own mood to be more completely in harmony with yours before writing to you about what is evidently so spontaneous an outcome of your true self. I should have wished to identify myself with this joy in the beauty of the world which bubbles up fountainlike from every one of these sparkling Roman transcripts, why called “Sospiri” I hardly know. One envies you the ebullient delight which must have flooded your veins before you could write many of these verses, notably “Fior di Primavera,” “Red Poppies,” and “The White Peacock”: the effect of colour and movement produced in these last two seems to be particularly happy, as also the descriptions of the sea of roses in the first which vividly recalled to me the prodigal wealth of blossom on the Riviera. I thoroughly agree with what George Meredith says of the sketch of “The Wild Mare,” the lines of which seem as quiveringly alive as the high strung nerves of these splendid creatures.
“August Afternoon in Rome” is also an admirable bit of impressionism and, if I remember, just that effect—
Far in the middle-flood, adrift, unoar’d,
A narrow boat, swift-moving, black,
Follows the flowing wave like a living thing.