[58] There were exceptions to this habitual carelessness; in 1898 he asked his sister for prayers that a friend might join the Church. She gave them and begged his, for her own purposes, in fair return.
[59] "Bodily being is the analogy of the soul's being; our temporal is our only clue to our spiritual life"; our fleshly senses the only medium for our divine experience. We are the symbols of ourselves. To such thoughts he adds disjointed notes in confirmation from the ancient mythologies: "Bird-heads to gods with man-bodies."—"Zeus = Sky."
[60] With nothing that he has to say of another poet is it so impossible to agree as with his own estimate of the relative importance of the sections of New Poems—
"Creccas Cottage, Pantasaph, November 1896.
"My dear Doubleday,—I regret that I cannot consent to the omission of the translations. If anything is to be left out, it must be the section Ultima, not the translations. I said at Pantasaph that I would keep these, whatever I left out. They were held over from my first book, and I will not hold them over again. I regard the 'Heard on the Mountain' as a feat in diction and metre; and in this respect Coventry Patmore agrees with me. But I do not at all mind leaving out the section Ultima.—Yours,
F. T."
[61] Note by F. T.: "That is not drama, but lyric."
[62] This play was again unfavourably received when, in 1903, he submitted it to T. P.'s Weekly. It is thus set forth on his MS. title page:
NAPOLEON JUDGES
A Tragedy in Two Scenes
Dramatis Personæ.
Napoleon.
General Augereau.
Madame Lebrun (an opera-dancer, Augereau's Mistress).
President of the Court Martial.
A French Deserter.
Officers. Soldiers.
Place.—Augereau's Camp. Time.—The Italian Campaign of 1796. During the first scene Napoleon is absent from Augereau's Camp.
Of another class is a modern comedy, full of laboriously smart give and take, called "Man Proposes, but Woman Disposes. Un Conte sans Raconteur. In Two Scenes."