Then he sought his Aphrodite, and found her, dull, tawdry, unbeautiful,—an outcast of the streets. He wrote his dreams; and then he felt that they were lies. He grew desperate, at last, and professed himself convicted of sin, and became a Christian—resolved to please his father, if he could not please himself. But this phase could not last; and he shattered his father’s new-found happiness by a wild denunciation of all creeds, and an assertion that there is no God higher than ourselves. Then was the father torn between his desire to seek his wife in Heaven, and his impulse to go with his son into the jaws of Hell. At last, in his turn, the father died; and the poet—the child of storm and stress—was left at liberty to be himself—
“——a thoroughfare
For all the pageantry of Time; to catch
The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour,
And make them known.”
There are lines, here and there, in this poem of exquisite beauty; but there are others that seem to me “tolerable and not to be endured.”
I make my “Exodus From Houndsditch,” without as yet being tempted to linger there, and come to “A Ballad of a Nun.” And here, indeed, you have something of which only John Davidson has proved himself capable. The Ballad tells the old Roman Catholic legend of the Nun whom the lust of the flesh tempted.
There are stanzas here of such splendid power and beauty that they thrill one like noble and stirring music. You shall listen to some of them. The Abbess loved this Nun so well that she had trusted her above all the rest, and made her the Keeper of the Door:—
“High on a hill the Convent hung,
Across a duchy looking down,
Where everlasting mountains flung