1. "The milkman never argues; he works alone and no one speaks to him; the city is asleep when he is on his job; he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day's work; he climbs two hundred wooden stairways; two horses are company for him; he never argues."
2. "Sometimes I have nervous moments— there is a girl who looks at me strangely as much as to say, You are a young man, and I am a young woman, and what are you going to do about it? And I look at her as much as to say, I am going to keep the teacher's desk between us, my dear, as long as I can."
3. "I hold her hands and press her to my breast.
"I try to fill my arms with her loveliness, to plunder her sweet smile with kisses, to drink her dark glances with my eyes.
"Ah, but where is it? Who can strain the blue from the sky?
"I try to grasp the beauty; it eludes me, leaving only the body in my hands.
"Baffled and weary, I came back. How can the body touch the flower which only the spirit may touch?"
4. "Child, I smelt the flowers,
The golden flowers … hiding in crowds like fairies at my feet,
And as I smelt them the endless smile of the infinite broke over me,
and I knew that they and you and I were one.
They and you and I, the cowherds and the cows, the jewels and the
potter's wheel, the mothers and the light in baby's eyes.
For the sempstress when she takes one stitch may make nine unnecessary;
And the smooth and shining stone that rolls and rolls like the great
river may gain no moss,
And it is extraordinary what a lot you can do with a platitude when you
dress it up in Blank Prose.
Child, I smelt the flowers."
CHAPTER VII
Recent criticism has been rich in its discussions of the lyric. John Drinkwater's little volume on The Lyric is suggestive. See also C. E. Whitmore's article in the Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass., December, 1918. Rhys's Lyric Poetry, Schelling's English Lyric, Reed's English Lyrical Poetry cover the whole field of the historical English lyric. A few books on special periods are indicated in the "Notes" to chapter ix.