ABOUT AND ROUNDABOUT
In Mr. Nahum's The Other Worlde, as I have said on page xxx, there were many passages written about and roundabout the poems contained in it. Some of these I copied out. With others that I have added since, they appear in the following pages. If the reader prefer poems and poems only in such a collection as this, would he of his kindness and courtesy ignore everything else? Otherwise, will he please forgive any blunders he may discover?
[1]. "This is the Key."
This jingle (like Nos. 15, 16 and others) is one of hundreds of nursery and dandling rhymes which I found in Mr. Nahum's book. Compared with more formal poems they are like wild flowers—pimpernel, eyebright, thyme, woodruff, and others even tinier, even quieter, but having their own private and complete little beauty if looked at closely. Who made them, how old they are; nobody knows. But when Noah's Ark stranded on the slopes of Mount Ararat, maybe a blossoming weed or two was nodding at the open third-storey window out of which over the waters of the flood the dove had followed the raven, and there, rejoicing in the sunshine and the green, sat Japheth's wife dandling little Magog on her lap, and crooning him some such lullaby.
[3].
On the one side is printed the old Scots, and on the other the best I can do to put it into the English of our own time. According to the dictionary the thistle-cock that cries shame on the sleepers still drowsing in their beds is the corn-bunting— a cousin of the yellow-hammer. He has a small harsh monotonous voice as if for the very purpose. Whereas the nightingale might seem to cry, "Nay, nay: it is in dreams you wander. Happy ones! Sleep on; sleep on."
[4]. "I passed by his Garden."
Whatever fate befell the Sluggard, I should like to have taken a walk in his garden, among those branching thistles, green thorns and briers. Maybe he sailed off at last to the Isle of Nightmare, or to the land where it is always afternoon, or was wrecked in Yawning Gap. He must, at any rate, have had an even heavier head than Dr. Watts supposed if he never so much as lifted it from his pillow to brood awhile on that still, verdurous scene. And the birds!
Indeed, to lie, between sleep and wake, when daybreak is brightening of an April or a May morning, and so listen to the far-away singing of a thrush or to the whistling of a robin or a wren is to seem to be transported back into the garden of Eden. Dreamers, too, may call themselves travellers.
Mr. Nahum's picture to this rhyme was of a man in rags looking into a small round mirror or looking-glass, but at what you couldn't see.