Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.

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.