[(1) Mr. de la Mare]
Mr. Walter de la Mare gives us no Thames of song. His genius is scarcely more than a rill. But how the rill shines! How sweet a music it makes! Into what lands of romance does it flow, and beneath what hedges populous with birds! It seems at times as though it were a little fugitive stream attempting to run as far away as possible from the wilderness of reality and to lose itself in quiet, dreaming places. There never were shyer songs than these.
Mr. de la Mare is at the opposite pole to poets so robustly at ease with experience as Browning and Whitman. He has no cheers or welcome for the labouring universe on its march. He is interested in the daily procession only because he seeks in it one face, one figure. He is love-sick for love, for beauty, and longs to save it from the contamination of the common world. Like the lover in The Tryst, he dreams always of a secret place of love and beauty set solitarily beyond the bounds of the time and space we know:
Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come,
There, out of all remembrance, make our home:
Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair,
Hollowed by Noah’s mouse beneath the chair
Wherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound,
Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound.