tions the many-sided poet, whose sympathies are wide, and whose
moods are varied, will touch with a certain suggestiveness; he will
flash a ray of cheerfulness into the haunts of pessimism, or throw a new
pathos into common situations. And Mr. Davidson possesses a large
measure of this many-sidedness, this versatility of sympathy. He appears
a very human man, a man unfettered by cant or creed, observing men and
things from various sides, and entering into their circumstance. Is he
without a creed? From his verses on the _Making of a Poet_ it would
appear so--

No creed for me! I am a man apart:
A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world;

* * * * *

A martyr for all mundane moods to tear;
The slave of every passion, and the slave
Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light;
A trembling lyre for every wind to sound.
I am a man set to overhear
The inner harmony, the very tune
Of nature's heart; to be a thoroughfare
For all the pageantry of Time: to catch
The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour
And make them known.

* * * * *

Nevertheless he, or one of his avatars, can also say of the celebration
of Christmas with its "sweet thoughts and deeds"--

A fearless, ruthless, wanton band,
Deep in our hearts we guard from scathe
Of last year's log a smouldering brand,
To light at Yule the fire of faith.

He makes no vulgar boast about escaping from the fetters of religion. He
spares us any flouts of intellectual superiority. He is apparently an
evolutionist, but withal finds little saving grace in that doctrine, and
is not uninclined to envy the old days

When Heaven and Hell were nigh.

It is true that behind his Basil and Herbert and Brian and Sandy and
Menzies and Ninian, who converse there in Fleet Street, we find it hard
to discover any definite synthetic philosophy of Davidson himself. On
the other hand, we have no particular wish to discover one. He is a
poet, not a Herbert Spencer. We may reasonably be content to catch the
side-lights which a poet throws from a large and liberal nature; to be
led by him to different points of view. If the result is that we find
the man himself to evade us, we can only admit that the same result
occurs with Shakespeare. Indeed, there is a hint that a synthetic
philosophy is exactly what Davidson never seeks to attain. Says
Ninian:--

Sometimes, when I forget myself, I t