1884 a new element was introduced. Until now, the influences of the young Dutch poetry had chiefly come from the United Kingdom; they were those of Shelley, Mrs Browning, the Rossettis (Dante and Christina). The French naturalists now became an additional ingredient and for some time the new Dutch literature became a sort of mixture of Shelley and Zola, heady and bewildering. This was the great flowering moment of the new school. One of the most important Dutch novelists, Louis Couperus (1863–1923), had his roots in the Tachtigers movement. His boyhood years were spent in Java, and he had preserved in all his nature a certain tropical magnificence. His first literary efforts were lyrics in the Tachtigers style, but Couperus proved far more important and durable as a novelist and his earliest story, Eline Vere (1889) already took him out of the ranks of his contemporaries. In 1891 he published Noodlot, which was translated into English as "Footsteps of Fate" It was greatly admired by Oscar Wilde, whose The Picture of Dorian Gray is said to have been influenced by it. Couperus continued to pour out one important novel after another until his death in 1923. He separated himself, as he developed, from the more fanatical members of the Tachtigers group, and addressed himself to the wider public. Another talent for prose was revealed by Frederik van Eeden (1860–1932) in De kleine Johannes ("Little Johnny", 1887) and in Van de koele meren des doods ("From the Cold Pools of Death", 1901), a melancholy novel. 19th century After 1887 the condition of modern Dutch literature remained comparatively stationary, and within the last decade of the 19th century was definitely declining. In 1889 a new poet, Herman Gorter (1864–1927) made his appearance with an epic poem called Mei ("May"), eccentric both in prosody and in treatment. He held his own without any marked advance towards lucidity or variety. Since the recognition of Gorter, however, no really remarkable talent has made itself prominent in Dutch poetry except P.C. Boutens (1870–1943), whose Verzen ("Verses") in 1898 were received with great respect. Willem Kloos, still the acute and somewhat turbulent leader of the school, collected his poems in 1894 and his critical essays in 1896. The others, with the exception of Couperus, showed symptoms of sinking into silence. The entire school, now that the struggle for recognition was over, and its members were accepted as