There was, I felt, quite a swing about that first stanza—a joyous and rollicking note of comradeship. 🔊 The second was slightly hysterical, perhaps. 🔊 But I liked the third, it was so bracingly unorthodox, even according to the tenets of Soames's peculiar sect in the faith. 🔊 Not much "trusting and encouraging" here! 🔊 Soames triumphantly exposing the devil as a liar, and laughing "full shrill," cut a quite heartening figure, I thought, then! 🔊 Now, in the light of what befell, none of his other poems depresses me so much as "Nocturne." 🔊

I looked out for what the metropolitan reviewers would have to say. 🔊 They seemed to fall into two classes: those who had little to say and those who had nothing. 🔊 The second class was the larger, and the words of the first were cold; insomuch that 🔊

  Strikes a note of modernity. . . These tripping numbers.—"The Preston Telegraph." 🔊

was the only lure offered in advertisements by Soames's publisher. 🔊 I had hoped that when next I met the poet I could congratulate him on having made a stir, for I fancied he was not so sure of his intrinsic greatness as he seemed. 🔊 I was but able to say, rather coarsely, when next I did see him, that I hoped Fungoids was "selling splendidly." 🔊 He looked at me across his glass of absinthe and asked if I had bought a copy. 🔊 His publisher had told him that three had been sold. 🔊 I laughed, as at a jest. 🔊

"You don't suppose I care, do you?" he said, with something like a snarl. 🔊 I disclaimed the notion. 🔊 He added that he was not a tradesman. 🔊 I said mildly that I wasn't, either, and murmured that an artist who gave truly new and great things to the world had always to wait long for recognition. 🔊 He said he cared not a sou for recognition. 🔊 I agreed that the act of creation was its own reward. 🔊