One of these less prosaic, less frequent moods is that of sentimental regret. Every one knows it, every one has been through it. When looked back upon, it is an experience to be valued. It is always a relief from the harder outlines of the present. It need have no bitterness and scarcely a tinge of remorse. This mood, or the indulgence in it, is the tribute the man of sensitive mind pays to his better nature, to the woman he might have loved, to the ideal he might have attained. It is a mood that the million recognise, but that only the one in a million—that is to say, the genuine poet—should be allowed to express. Another mood, and a more impersonal one, is that which implies discontent with the present surroundings, and longing for more distant fields, for ampler opportunities, for less prosaic realities. The discontent may be merely petulant or it may have in it something of the nature of the Divine. All depends on the temperament of the individual. Yet another mood, and a still more pronounced and easily recognised one, is that of erotic or of semi-sensual desire. In its cruder and more direct form it is the mood that finds voice in the Shakespearian poem of Venus and Adonis; in its etherealised essence it is the mood of Shelley in the poem addressed to Emilia Viviani.
The first of these moods—the half-regretful, half-sentimental and wholly idealistic one—is finely interpreted by Daley in the verses entitled Years Ago. He voices a passion that is no longer a passion, but rather a figure of remembrance, from which the poetic temperament can draw Memnon music. The woman of these verses is not described, but suggested. There is no need to describe her. The reader must build her up out of his own experiences. She must always be looked at from a distance, and must always live in the mind of the man for whom the intenser passion of desire has become the soft glow of remembrance. Daley shows her silhouetted against the sky-line at the moment when his ship, the inevitable ship of Destiny, goes sailing:
Across the seas in the years agone;
And seaward set were the eyes unquailing,
And landward looking the faces wan.
The poem is a very fine one. It is musical, rhythmical, dreamily sensuous, and never crudely realistic. The workmanship is even, and the high level reached in the first verse is maintained to the end. The words and the treatment create their own sentiment, and always suggest more than they say.
There is another mood in which Daley has been equally successful—the mood of picturesque romance. This is the frame of mind in which he sails “into the sunset’s glow.” Here, also, he strikes a note that awakens a universal echo. Every man has wanted, at some time or another, to sail into the sunset, understanding by that word the whole untrodden, unattainable, indefinable, but brilliantly lighted and always glowing region that lies beyond the boundaries of the place in which he follows out the round of his allotted tasks. It is only on the wings of imagination that one ever arrives within sight of this region. And the wings themselves must be of a certain texture, or they will melt more quickly than did those of Icarus. There are only one or two people who can supply materials calculated to take the voyager there. Victor Daley is one of these. He has himself explained the necessary equipment:—
Our ship shall be of sandal built,
Like ships in old-world tales,
Carven with cunning art, and gilt,