/# Mr. Pearsall Smith had sent H. J. the _Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben_, the young writer whose rare promise was cut short by his accidental death in 1867. His poems were edited in 1918, with a biographical introduction, by Mr. Robert Bridges, a friend and contemporary of Dolben at Eton. #/
/* Lamb House, Rye. October 27th, 1913. */
I thank you very kindly for the other bounties which have followed the bounty of your visit--beginning with your vivid and charming letter, a chronicle of such happy homeward adventure. I greatly enjoyed our so long delayed opportunity for free discourse, and hold that any less freedom would have done it no due honour at all. I like to think on the contrary that we have planted the very standard of freedom, very firmly, in my little oak parlour, and that it will hang with but comparative heaviness till you come back at some favouring hour and help me to give its folds again to the air. The munificence of your two little books I greatly appreciate, and have promptly appropriated the very interesting contents of Bridges' volume. (The small accompanying guide gives me more or less the key to _his_ proper possessive.) The disclosure and picture of the wondrous young Dolben have made the liveliest impression on me, and I find his personal report of him very beautifully and tenderly, in fact just perfectly, done. Immensely must one envy him the possession of such a memory--recovered and re-stated, sharply rescued from the tooth of time, after so many piled-up years. Extraordinarily interesting I think the young genius himself, by virtue of his rare special gift, and even though the particular preoccupations out of which it flowers, their whole note and aspect, have in them for me something positively antipathetic. Uncannily, I mean, does the so precocious and direct avidity for all the paraphernalia of a complicated ecclesiasticism affect me--as if he couldn't possibly have come to it, or, as we say, gone for it, by experience, at that age--so that there is in it a kind of implication of the insincere and the merely imitational, the cheaply "romantic." However, he was clearly born with that spoon in his mouth, even if he might have spewed it out afterwards--as one wonders immensely whether he wouldn't. In fact that's the interest of him--that it's the privilege of such a rare young case to make one infinitely wonder how it might or mightn't have been for him--and Bridges seems to me right in claiming that no _equally_ young case has ever given us ground for so _much_ wonder (in the personal and aesthetic connection.) Would his "ritualism" have yielded to more life and longer days and his quite prodigious, but so closely associated, gift have yielded _with_ that (as though indissolubly mixed with it)? Or would a big development of inspiration and form have come? Impossible to say of course--and evidently he could have been but most fine and distinguished whatever should have happened. Moreover it is just as we have him, and as Bridges has so scrupulously given him, that he so touches and charms the imagination--and how instinctive poetic mastery was of the essence, was the most rooted of all things, in him, a faculty or mechanism almost abnormal, seems to me shown by the thinness of his letters compared with the thickness and maturity of his verse. But how can one talk, and how can he be anything but wrapped, for our delightful uncertainty, in the silver mists of morning?--which one mustn't so much as want to breathe upon too hard, much less clear away. They are an immense felicity to him and leave him a most particular little figure in the great English roll. I sometimes go to Windsor, and the very next one I shall peregrinate over to Eton on the chance of a sight of his portrait.