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the last of that long, illustrious line of poets who sang as no others have sung of the pure delight-fulness of a life with nature. Something of this charm is undoubtedly due to the beauty of the language they wrote in and to the free, airy grace of assonants. What a hard, artificial sound the rhyme too often has: the clink that falls at regular intervals as of a stone-breaker's hammer! In the freer kinds of Spanish poetry there are numberless verses that make the smoothest lines and lyrics of our sweetest and most facile singers, from Herrick to Swinburne, seem hard and mechanical by comparison. But there is something more. I doubt, for one thing, if we are justified in the boast we sometimes make that the feeling for Nature is stronger in our poets than in those of other countries. The most scientific critic may be unable to pick a hole in Tennyson's botany and zoology; but the passion for, and feeling of oneness with Nature may exist without this modern minute accuracy. Be this as it may, it was not Tennyson, nor any other of our poets, that I would have taken to my dreamed-of solitary cabin for companionship: Melendez came first to my mind. I think of his lines to a butterfly:
BIRDS IN A VILLAGE 43
De donde alegre vienes Tan suelta y tan festiva, Las valles alegrando Veloz mariposilla?*
and can imagine him--the poet himself--coming to see me through the woods and down the hill with the careless ease and lightness of heart of his own purple-winged child of earth and air--tan suelta y tan festiva. Here in these four or five words one may read the whole secret of his charm--the exquisite delicacy and seeming artlessness in the form, and the spirit that is in him--the old, simple, healthy, natural gladness in nature, and feeling of kinship with all the children of life. But I do not wish to disturb anyone in his prepossessions. It would greatly trouble me to think that my reader should, for the space of a page, or even of a single line, find himself in opposition to and not with me; and I am free
* May be roughly rendered thus:
Whence, blithe one, comest thou With that airy, happy flight--To make the valleys glad, O swift-winged butterfly?
44 BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE