implicity of the language as if they had been
written by Burns or by a Greek lyrist. I do not think that it would be
possible to find anywhere in the English language more pure and fresh
delight in the sights and sounds of rural nature expressed with such
apparent naivete. And all the time the mind's eye is kept so closely, so
distinctly, on the object that the result is often the sublimity of art
as defined by Longinus, the selection and combination of exactly those
features which are the most essential and most telling. For instance, no
man who did not feel and realize with vividness, no man who lacked a
genius for expression, could so select and place just the touches which
describe the sudden descent of the lark in the evening sky. The lines
occur in the song of "Spring" in _Ballads and Songs_:--

High, O high, from the opal sky,
Shouting against the dark,
"Why, why, why, must the day go by?"
Fell a passionate lark.

The words "opal," "shouting," "fell," and "passionate," are exactly the
words, and all the words, which could be demanded in an ideal
word-picture by those who have been familiar with the scene itself. And
to make the ideal twice ideal, the very sound of the bird is brought
before one's mind after a score of years, by the whole passage, and
particularly in the reiterated "Why, why, why." If there is more
consummate simplicity of art anywhere contained in as small a compass of
words, I confess I do not know where it is to be found. Shelley does not
surpass this.

Throughout Davidson's poems there is this same positive revelling in
those delights of the eye and ear and smell which meet the wanderer in
the country. They are fresh to him every time; and he realizes and
fulfils that function of the poet, the bringing back of new freshness
into things common, at which he hints when he makes one of his
characters say:--

Dear Menzies, talk of sight and sound,
And make us _feel_ the blossom-time.

In these more sensuous moods he is so filled with the simple Chaucerian
gladsomeness of spring that he can sing, or make one of his characters
sing--for after all, his characters are but so many sides of himself--

I have been with the nightingale;
I have learned his song so sweet;
I sang it aloud by wood and dale,
And under my breath in the street.

And again--

I can hear in that valley of mine,
Loud-voiced on a leafless spray,
How the robin sings, flushed with his