I dreamed of you last night, I saw your face
    All radiant and unshadowed of distress,
    And as of old, in measured tunefulness,
    I heard your golden voice and marked you trace
    Under the common thing the hidden grace,
    And conjure wonder out of emptiness,
    Till mean things put on Beauty like a dress,
    And all the world was an enchanted place.

    And so I knew that it was well with you,
    And that unprisoned, gloriously free,
    Across the dark you stretched me out your hand. 
    And all the spite of this besotted crew,
    (Scrabbling on pillars of Eternity)
    How small it seems!  Love made me understand.

ALFRED DOUGLAS.

December 10, 1900.

Whoever chooses to compare this first sketch of the sonnet of 1900 with the sonnet as it was published in 1910 will remark three notable differences.

The first sketch was entitled “To Oscar Wilde,” the revision to “The Dead Poet.”

In the early draft, the first line: 

“I dreamed of you last night, I saw your face,” has become less intimate, having been changed into: 

“I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face.”

Finally the sextet which in the first sketch was very inferior to the rest has now been discarded in favour of six lines which are worthy of the octave.  The published sonnet is assuredly superior to the first sketch, superb though that was.

THE STORY OF “MR. AND MRS. DAVENTRY”

(See page 534)

There has been so much discussion about the play entitled “Mr. and Mrs. Daventry,” and Oscar Wilde’s share in it, that I had better set forth here briefly what happened.

When I returned to London in the summer of 1899 after buying, as I thought, all rights in the sketch of the scenario from Oscar, I wrote at once the second, third and fourth acts of the play, as I had told Oscar I would.  I sent him what I had written and asked him to write the first act as he had promised for the L50.

Some time before this I had seen Mr. Forbes Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell in “Hamlet,” and Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s Ophelia had made a deeper impression on me than even the Hamlet of Forbes Robertson.  I wished her to take my play, and as luck would have it, she had just gone into management on her own account and leased the Royalty Theatre.

I read her my play one afternoon, and at once she told me she would take it; but I must write a first act.  I told her that I was no good at preliminary scenes and that Oscar Wilde had promised to write a first act, which would, of course, enhance the value of the play enormously.

To my surprise Mrs. Patrick Campbell would not hear of it:  “Quite impossible,” she said, “a play’s not a patchwork quilt; you must write the first act yourself.”

“I must write to Oscar then,” I replied, “and see whether he has finished it already or not.”