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We fight against odds as well.”

Enfant perdu: so the dying Heine calls himself. Enfants perdus, that is what they were! The storms of our terrible period of transition raged about them: “they could not wait their passing,” as Arnold says—

“they could not wait their passing, they are dead.”

“I am slow,” says Gordon,

“I am slow in learning, and swift in

forgetting, and I have grown

so weary with long sand-sifting!

T’wards the mist, where the breakers moan

the rudderless bark is drifting,

through the shoals of the quick-sands shifting—

In the end shall the night-rack lifting,

discover the shores unknown?”

The idea of killing himself seems to have been with him from almost the first. It was not “bitter” to him: “man in his blindness” taught so; but, to him that

“mystic hour

when the wings of the shadowy angel lower,”

was not without its charm. “When I first heard the sad news,” Mr. Hammersley tells us, “I was not the least surprised. I really expected that what did happen would happen.” We all know Gordon’s poem, “De Te.” The last two verses of it are the best criticism that we have to offer “of him,” “found dead in the heather, near his home, with a bullet from his own rifle in his brain:”