O, I can tell and I can know
What the wind rehearses:
"A poet loved a lady so,
Loved her well, and let her go
While he wrote his verses."

.....

That's the tale the winds relate
Soon as night is shady.
If it's true, I'll simply state
A poet is a fool to rate
His art above his lady.

Returning, however, to the larger implications of this poetry, one may find a passion for liberty in it, and a courageous faith in the future of the race. Here we have, in fact, a pure idealist, one of the invincible few who have brought their ideals into touch with reality. One does not suspect it at first—or at least we do not see how far it goes—largely for the reason that it is so deeply grounded. The poet's hold on life, on the actual, on the very data of experience, is unyielding: his perception of truth is keen and his intellectual honesty complete. And then the way in which his imagination moulds things in the round, as it were, leaves no room to guess that there is a limitless something behind or within. True, we have felt all along what we can only call the spiritual touch in this poetry. It is always there, lighter or more commanding, and sometimes it will come home very sweetly in a comic piece, as for instance when "The Merry Policeman," appointed guardian of the Tree, calls reassuringly to the scared thief:

... "Be at rest,
The best to him who wants the best."

We have observed, too, a faculty of seeing the spirit of things—a habit of looking right through facts to something beyond them. But still we did not quite understand what these signs meant; and if we tried to account for them in any way, we probably offered ourselves the all-too-easy explanation that this was the playful, fanciful, Celtic way of looking at the world. Well, so it may be; but that charming manner is, in all gravity, just the outward sign of an inward grace. And if anyone should doubt that it points in this case to a clear idealism, he may be invited to consider this little poem which prefaces the poet's second volume, called "The Hill of Vision":

Everything that I can spy
Through the circle of my eye,
Everything that I can see
Has been woven out of me;
I have sown the stars, and threw
Clouds of morning and of eve
Up into the vacant blue;
Everything that I perceive,
Sun and sea and mountain high,
All are moulded by my eye:
Closing it, what shall I find?
—Darkness, and a little wind.

Now it must not be inferred that Mr Stephens is an austere person who propounds ideals to himself as themes for his poetry. We should detect his secret much more readily if he did—and it may be that we should not like him quite so well. Hardly ever do you catch him, as it were, saying to his Muse: "Come, let us make a song about liberty, or the future." The very process of his thought, as well as the order of his verse, seems often to be by way of an object to an idea. He takes some bit of the actual world—a bird, a tree, or a human creature; and tuning his instrument to that, he is presently off and away into the blue.

Once, however, he did sing directly on this subject of liberty, and about the external, physical side of it. It was, of course, in that early book; and there may also be found two studies of the idea of liberty in its more abstract nature. They both treat of the woman giving up her life into the hands of the man whom she marries. And in both there is brought out with ringing clarity the inalienable freedom of the human soul. Thus "The Red-haired Man's Wife," musing upon the inexplicable changes that marriage has wrought for her—on her dependence, and on the apparent loss of her very identity, wins through to the light—

I am separate still,
I am I and not you:
And my mind and my will,
As in secret they grew,
Still are secret, unreached and untouched and not subject to you.