Page:Colour studies in Paris.djvu/72



This is quite an average specimen of the manner of the poet of the bats: if, however, one prefers a greater simplicity, we need but turn the page, and we read:

It is not a quality that the author would probably appreciate, but the quality that most impresses in this book is the extraordinary diligence that must have been required to produce it. There is not a spontaneous verse in it, from beginning to end few would seem to have required thought, but none could have failed to demand labour. At its best it has that funambulesque air of the Whistler portrait; when it is not playing tricks it is ambling along stolidly; but the quintessential