‘September, October, November’;
I was imitating, not Horace, but the original Greek Alcaic, though Horace’s is perhaps the finest metre.” The two Latin metres which I have more than once heard him admire were the Hexameter and the Alcaic.
I find that in my Journal I wrote as regards this walk: “I wish I could remember more. He was wholly facilis, and I never felt less afraid of him or more reverent.” Perhaps I should add that during the walk he told me an extraordinary number of ghost stories—a man appearing to several people, and then vanishing before their eyes.
After dinner that evening we went to his sanctum to hear him read the last Act of the “Promise of May.” “Well, isn’t that tragic?” he naïvely asked at one point, I think where Eva falls down dead.
Next morning, I had to leave quite early for London. He just appeared at the top of the stairs, and offered to come down to say good-bye, but I would not let him. “I can remember little more of this delightful visit,” so I wrote at the time. “He was full, as usual, of the public lies, and the necessity of England being strong at sea.”
I did not see him again till after my second marriage, which took place on August 9, 1888. We paid a flying visit to Lambert’s Hotel, Freshwater, in April 1889. Of this I have made only the scantiest record. Something led us to speak of the famous line in the chorus of the Agamemnon:
ὀμμάτων ἐν ἀχηνίαις.
“So modern,” he remarked. He also spoke of the pathos of Euripides, and of the grandeur of the “Passing of Oedipus” in the Oedipus Coloneus, and Theseus
χεῖρ᾽ ἀντέχοντα κρατός.
He referred again to lack of sympathy in his time between dons and undergraduates. This seemed to be a memory often present to his mind.