alk
As though I were persuaded of the truth
Of some received or unreceived belief;
But always afterwards I am ashamed
At such lewd lapses into bigotry.

And though another immediately ejaculates

Intolerantly tolerant!

we have a feeling that the poet has betrayed an attitude of mind not
wholly unlike his own.

His outlook is both bright and dark. The modern dragons, it has been
said, are dooming "religion and poetry." The answer comes--

They may doom till the moon forsakes
Her dark, star-daisied lawn;
They may doom till Doomsday breaks
With angels to trumpet the dawn;
While love enchants the young
And the old have sorrow and care,
No song shall be unsung,
Unprayed no prayer.

Nature is full of joy, man may find abounding delight of life in the
midst of it; but what of his destiny?

For the fate of the elves is nearly the same
As the terrible fate of men;
To love, to rue, to be, and pursue
A flickering wisp of the fen.
We must play the game with a careless smile,
Though there's nothing in the hand;
We must toil as if it were worth our while
Spinning our ropes of sand;
And laugh, and cry, and live, and die
At the waft of an unseen hand.

And again--

I am not thinking solely of myself,
But of the groaning cataract of life,
The ruddy stream that leaps importunate
Out of the night, and in a moment vaults
The immediate treacherous precipice of time,
Splashing the stars, downward into the night.

And apart from destiny, which is beyond human control, society is much
at fault. Not only is Davidson plainly democratic, he expresses the
complaints and aspirations of the higher type of those who might be
socialists, if socialism were allowed to be a development, and not
tyrannously imposed as a system. He talks of--

... Slaves in Pagan Rome--
In Christian England--who begin to test
The purpose of their state, to strike for rest
And time to feel alive in.

And--

Hoarsely they beg of Fate to give
A little lightening of their woe,
A little time to love, to live,
A little time to think and know.

There are other wrong elements in society besides poverty, and the poet
finds occasion to express one in particular. But what Mrs. Grand
requires three volumes to discuss is treated with infinitely more effect
by him in a dozen lines. The purport may be gathered from these three:--