The Lady of All Our Dreams
“In John Charteris appeared a man with an inborn sense of the supreme interest and the overwhelming emotional and spiritual relevancy of human life as it is actually and obscurely lived; a man with unmistakable creative impulses and potentialities; a man who, had he lived in a more mature and less self-deluding community—a community that did not so rigorously confine its interest in facts to business, and limit its demands upon art to the supplying of illusions—might humbly and patiently have schooled his gifts to the service of his vision.… As it was, he accepted defeat and compromised half-heartedly with commercialism.”
And men unborn will read of Heloise,
And Ruth, and Rosamond, and Semele,
When none remembers your name’s melody
Or rhymes your name, enregistered with these.
And will my name wake moods as amorous
As that of Abelard or Launcelot
Arouses? be recalled when Pyramus
And Tristram are unrhymed of and forgot?—
Time’s laughter answers, who accords to us
More gracious fields, wherein we harvest—what?
JOHN CHARTERIS. Torrismond’s Envoi, in Ashtaroth’s Lackey.