holly-wine,
Of the moonlit blossoms of May.

In all such passages there is the genuine note of the vernal joy which
stirs naturally in the blood of all men who are men. The writer feels as
the birds feel, nay, as the burgeoning hedges feel, when--

The blackbirds with their oboe voices make
The sweetest broken music, all about
The beauty of the day, for beauty's sake,
And all about the mates whose love they won,
And all about the sunlight and the sun.

Or when--

A passionate nightingale adown the lane
Shakes with the force and volume of his song
A hawthorn's heaving foliage.

But this sensuous rapture, which reminds us of Keats, though of a Keats
whose expression is more like that of Shelley, is by no means all that
Davidson can feel in nature. Through the eyes and other senses the
influence of nature penetrates to his soul and spirit. He touches
Wordsworth in such lines as these:--

All my emotion and imagining
Were of the finest tissue that is woven,
From sense and thought....
I seemed to be created every morn.
A golden trumpet pealed along the sky:
The sun arose: the whole earth rushed upon me.
Sometimes the tree that stroked my windowpane
Was more than I could grasp; sometimes my thought
Absorbed the universe.

It is true that these words are put in the mouth of that one of his
dramatis personae who is of the most melancholy and brooding disposition;
but he who can make another say--

I am haunted by the heavens and the earth;
... I am besieged by things that I have seen:
Followed and watched by rivers; snared and held
In labyrinthine woods and tangled meads;
Hemmed in by mountains; waylaid by the sun;
Environed and beset by moon and stars;
Whispered by winds and summoned by the sea.

--he who can put this thought in another's mouth has necessarily first
experienced some measure of it himself.

But it is not merely about external nature that our Fleet Street
journalists talk. They speak of such questions of man and life and
destiny as are wont to engage any gathering of thoughtful men, and
particularly those who are poetically disposed. The contrasts between
the beauty of rural nature and the squalor of life, especially the life
of the town, these and other matters receive such suggestive treatment
as can be given to them by a poet who has no desire to become a
preacher, and no desire to pose as an exhaustive philosopher. Upon such
ques