Sitting upon the spray,
So loud he wakened Robin Hood,
In greenwood where he lay.”
Suchlike utterances of ballad-writers and early poets might be multiplied without number. It is a penalty we have to pay for our late and over-stimulated civilization that such direct and unreflecting expressions of gladness in the face of Nature seem hardly any longer possible for a poet. If he will be listened to by our jaded, sophisticated ears, it is not enough for him to utter once again the spontaneous gladness that human hearts feel, and always will feel, in the pleasant air and the sunshine; he must say something about it which shall be novel, and out of the way, something subtle or analytic, or strongly stimulative. And yet it cannot but be that a poet who has a heart keenly sensitive to the common sights of earth and sky, and who describes these with the direct freshness which feeling heart and clear eye always give, may still do much to win back men from over-subtilizing, and to make them feel as if they have never felt before—
“The simple, the sincere delight,
The habitual scene of hill and dale,
The rural herds, the vernal gale,
The tangled vetches’ purple bloom,
The fragrance of the bean’s perfume.”