"The dome of day o'erbrims with sound
From humming wings on errands bound,"
"Pausing in the twilight dim,
Hear him lift his evening hymn,"
"Again from out the garden hives
The exodus of frenzied bees;
The humming cyclone onward drives,
Or finds repose amid the trees."
"Then waiting long hath recompense,
And all the world is glad with May."
"Oh, skater in the fields of air," he says of the swallow. How well this expresses the flight of the swallow!
"The robin perched on treetop tall
Heavenward lifts his evening call."
"Forth from the hive go voyaging bees,
Cruising far each sunny hour."
There are many passages of this kind in his poems and they express the moods of Nature, perhaps as well as it is possible for them to be put in words. In Arbutus Days, he uses the following figure to paint a spring day:
"Like mother bird upon her nest
The day broods o'er the earth."
To him the common things are all beautiful and if we only have the eyes to see with, they are made beautiful for us by him. Recognizing the fate of every insincere book, he declares: "Only an honest book can live; only absolute sincerity can stand the test of time. Any selfish or secondary motive vitiates a work of art, as it vitiates a religious life. Indeed, I doubt if we fully appreciate the literary value of staple, fundamental human virtues and qualities—probity, directness, simplicity, sincerity, love." He is probably not an inspired poet, but I shall claim for him that he is an honest singer, a sincere interpreter of Nature, and every virtue referred to in the above quotation he has woven into Bird and Bough. What he says of another we can appropriately say of him: "This poet sees the earth as one of the orbs, and has sought to adjust his imagination to the modern problems and conditions, always taking care, however, to preserve an outlook into the highest regions."