We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination.

He contributed to The Yellow Book and associated with the Rhymers' Club. The book My Ladies' Sonnets appeared in 1887 and in 1889 be became for a brief time literary secretary to Wilson Barrett. He has been credited with the 1906 translation from the Danish of Peter Nansen's Love's Trilogy; but most sources and the book itself attribute it to Julie.

The American actress Eva Le Gallienne (1899–1991) was his daughter by his second marriage.