Thus, too, "The Rebel" finds an answer to an importunate lover—

You sob you love me—What,
Must I desert my soul
Because you wish to kiss my lips,

.....

I must be I, not you,
That says the thing in brief.
I grew to this without your aid,
Can face the future unafraid,
Nor pine away with grief
Because I'm lonely....

It is, however, in "A Prelude and a Song" that this ardour of freedom finds purest expression. Not that the poem was designed to that end. I believe that it was made for nothing on this earth but the sheer joy of singing. How can one describe this poem? It is the lyrical soul of poetry; it is the heart of poetic rapture; it is the musical spirit of the wind and of birds' cries; it is a passion of movement, swaying to the dancing grace of leaves and flowers and grass, to the majesty of sailing clouds; it is the sweet, shrill, palpitating ecstasy of the lark, singing up and up until he is out of sight, sustaining his song at the very door of heaven, and singing into sight again, to drop suddenly down to the green earth, exhausted.—And I have not yet begun to say what the poem really is: I have a doubt whether prose is equal to a definition. In some degree at any rate it is a pæan of freedom: delighted liberty lives in it. But we cannot apply our little distinctions here, saying that it is this or that or the other kind of freedom which is extolled; because we are now in a region where thought and feeling are one; in a golden age where good and evil are lost in innocency; in a blessed state where body and soul have forgotten their old feud in glad reunion.

One hesitates to quote from the poem. It is long, and as the title implies, it is in two movements. But though every stanza has a lightsome grace which makes it lovely in itself—though the whole chain, if broken up, would yield as many gems as there are stanzas, irregular in size and shape indeed, but each shining and complete—the great beauty of the poem is its beauty as a whole. It would seem a reproach to imperil that. Yet there is a culminating passage of extreme significance to which we must come directly for the crowning word of the poet's philosophy. From that we may take a fragment now, if only to observe the reach of its imagination and to win some sense which the poem conveys of limitless spiritual range.

Reach up my wings!
Now broaden into space and carry me
Beyond where any lark that sings
Can get:
Into the utmost sharp tenuity,
The breathing-point, the start, the scarcely-stirred
High slenderness where never any bird
Has winged to yet!
The moon peace and the star peace and the peace
Of chilly sunlight: to the void of space,
The emptiness, the giant curve, the great
Wide-stretching arms wherein the gods embrace
And stars are born and suns....

There follows hard upon that what is in effect a confession of faith. It is not explicitly so, of course. Subjective this poet may be—is it not a virtue in the lyricist?—but he does not confide his religion to us in so many words. He has an artistic conscience. But the avowal, though it is by way of allegory and grows up out of the imagery of the poem as naturally as a blossom from its stem, is clear enough. And is supported elsewhere, implicitly, or by a mental attitude, or outlined now and then in figurative brilliance. There can be no reason to doubt its strength and its sincerity—and there is every reason to rejoice in it—for it reveals Mr Stephens as a poet of the future.

One pauses there, realizing that the term may mean very much—or nothing at all. It may even suggest a certain technical vogue which, however admirable in the theory of its originators, apparently is not yet justified in the creation of manifest beauty. Our poet has no association with that, of course, except in that he shares the general impulse of the poetic spirit of his generation. That is, quite clearly, to escape from the tyranny of the past in thought and word and metrical form; and therein he is at one with most of the poets in this book. We may grant that it is an important exception: that the movement which is indicated here may be the sober British version of its more daring Italian counterpart. Yet there remains still a difference wide enough and deep enough to disclaim any technical relationship.

The root of the matter lies there, however. In Mr Stephens what we may call the poetic instinct of the age works not merely to escape from the past, but to advance into the future—and it has become a conscious, reasoned hope in human destiny. It does not with him so much influence the form of the work as it directs the spirit of it. And that spirit is an absolute and impassioned belief in the future of mankind. Therein he stands contrasted with many of the younger English poets, and with his own compatriots. With many of his compeers the escape has been into their own time, and the noblest thing evolved from that is a grave and tender social conscience. Some, of course, have not escaped at all, and have no wish to do so. Their work has its own soft evening loveliness. But whilst Mr Yeats lives delicately in a romantic past, whilst poor Synge lived tragically in a sardonic present, this poet stands on his hill of vision and cries to the world the good tidings of a promised land. Here it is, from the closing passage of "A Prelude and a Song":