So every time we passed it by,
Sailing to England's slaughter-house,
Eight ragged sheep-men—tramps and thieves—
Would stroke that sheep's black nose.
Yet of how different a quality is the whole admirable selection of eight poems from Mr. de la Mare, to illustrate which we quote the exquisite Fare Well:
When I lie where shades of darkness
Shall no more assail mine eyes,
Nor the rain make lamentation
When the wind sighs;
How will fare the world whose wonder
Was the very proof of me?
Memory fades, must the remembered
Perishing be?
Oh, when this my dust surrenders,
Hand, foot, lip, to dust again,
May those loved and loving faces
Please other men.
May the rusting harvest hedgerow
Still the Traveller's Joy entwine.
And as happy children gather
Posies once mine.
Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight.
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
In other days.
We come again upon another manner in the poems of Mr. Robert Nichols. Here an inadequate passage from a long and very lovely piece called The Sprig of Lime will serve to suggest his qualities:
Sweet lime that often at the height of noon
Diffusing dizzy fragrance from your boughs
Tasselled with blossoms more innumerable
Than the black bees, the uproar of whose toil
Filled your green vaults, winning such metheglyr.
As clouds their sappy cells, distil, as once
Ye used, your sunniest emanations
Towards the window where a woman kneels—
She who within that room in childish hours
Lay through the lasting murmur of blanch'd noon
Behind the sultry blind, now full, now flat,
Drinking anew of every odorous breath,
Supremely happy in her ignorance
Of Time that hastens hourly and of death
Who need not haste.
These poems are not realism, but passages of reality imaginatively seized and transfigured by passion; and the same description may be applied to a number of pieces in this book as different from these as these are from one another. If we attempt to map out the whole achievement and promise which the book represents, we must refer to the originality and beauty of rhythm displayed by Mr. John Freeman in such a poem as The Alde, which begins:
How near I walked to Love,
How long, I cannot tell;
I was like the Alde that flows
Quietly through green level lands,
So quietly, it knows
Their shape, their greenness, and their shadows well;
And then undreamingly for miles it goes
And silently, beside the sea.