“Here, sir,” he said, holding the volume at arm’s-length and declaiming, sententiously, through his nose—“here is the sort of stuff we English feed the imaginative passion on.
“ ‘TO A ROBIN
“ ‘Sweet social bird! Whose soft harmonious lays
Swell the glad song of thy Creator’s praise,
Say, art thou conscious of approaching ills?
Fell winter’s storms, the pointed blast that kills?’
“There, sir, there’s the proper pedantic stuff for you. It puzzles me to think what our English woods would be like if all the ‘sweet social birds’ sang in that fashion. And can you tell me, sir, why winter is always ‘fell’ with these gentlemen, and any poor thrush ‘a member of the feathered tribe’? Damn it, why can’t they call a wind a wind, instead of ‘Black Boreas’s breath,’ or some such scholarly twaddle? I tell you, Richard, this sort of stuff sickens me; it is like looking at some painted and behooped old hag, and trying to think she’s a pretty shepherdess. Why, sir, your verses are as different from them as the scent of new-mown hay from the scent of a beauty’s pomade-box. They smell of the downs and of the woods and the sea, sir—they do that, by gad!”
Jeffray was watching the strenuous play of thought on Wilson’s countenance.
“Then you do not think, Dick, that my poetry would be popular?”
An indescribable flash of ironical amusement leaped across the painter’s face.