After leaving him I recrossed the Champs Elysées—perspired so freely that the Seine perceptibly rose—sank exhausted on a seat at the Café de la Paix—dwelt in ecstasy while absorbing a glace aux pistaches—then went back to the Grand Hotel—and to my room, where after a bit I set to and finished my concluding Grosvenor Gallery Notice.
On Sunday, if I can manage it, I will go to Mdme. Blavatsky.
On Monday Bourget comes here for me at twelve, and we breakfast together (he with me this time)—and I then go to M. Lucien Mariex, who is to take and introduce me to M. Muntz, the writer of the best of the many books on Raphael and an influential person in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Somebody else is to take me to look at some of the private treasures in the École des Beaux Arts. In the course of the week I am to see Alphonse Daudet, and Bourget is going to introduce me to Émile Zola. As early as practicable I hope to get to Neuilly to see M. Milsand, but don’t know when. If practicable I am also to meet François Coppée (the chief living French poet after Victor Hugo)—also M. M. Richepin, F. Mistral (author of Miréio), and one or two others. Amongst artists I am looking forward to meeting Bouguereau, Cormin, Puvis de Chavannes, and Jules Breton. As much as any one else, I look forward to making the acquaintance of Guizot to whose house I am going shortly with M. Bourget. There is really a delightful fraternity here amongst the literary and artistic world. And every one seems to want to do something for me, and I feel as much flattered as I am pleased. Of course my introductions have paved the way, and, besides, Bourget has said a great deal about me as a writer—too much, I know.”
The two important events of 1884 were the publication of a second volume of Poems, and our marriage.
In June Earth’s Voices (Elliot Stock) was issued and was well received at home and in America. In an article on William Sharp and Fiona Macleod written for The Century in 1906 Mr. Ernest Rhys wrote of this volume:
“There was an impassioned delight in nature—in nature at large, that is—in her seas and skies, or in her scenery subjectively coloured by lyric emotion to be found in these early books.
“Perhaps one of his Northern poems may best serve to illustrate his faculty; and there is one that is particularly to the purpose, since it sketches ‘Moonrise’ from the very spot—Iona—with which so many of the ‘Fiona’ tales and fantasies were to be connected afterward.
Here where in dim forgotten days,
A savage people chanted lays
To long since perished gods, I stand:
The sea breaks in, runs up the sand,
Retreats as with a long-drawn sigh,
Sweeps in again, again leaves dry
The ancient beach, so old and yet
So new that as the strong tides fret
The island barriers in their flow
The ebb hours of each day can know
A surface change. The day is dead,
The Sun is set, and overhead
The white north stars set keen and bright;
The wind upon the sea is light
And just enough to stir the deep
With phosphorescent gleams and sweep
The spray from salt waves as they rise.
“Sharp’s early work is more like that of a lyric improvisator than of a critical modern poet. At this period he cared more for the free colours of verse than for exact felicity of phrase. His writings betrayed a constant quest after those hardly realisable regions of thought, and those keener lyric emotions, which, since Shelley wrote and Rossetti wrote and painted, have so often occupied the interpreters of the vision and spectacle of nature.
“One may find this variously attempted or half expressed in several of the poems of his second book. In one called ‘A Record’ (to which a special inscription drew attention in the copy he sent me), he treats very fancifully the mystery of transmigration. He pictures himself sitting in his room, and there he resumes the lives, and states of being, of many savage types of man and beast viewed in passion and action—the tiger, the eagle, and the primitive man who lighted the fire that consumed the dry scrub and his fellow-tribesmen: