ue in perfect restful beauty and with
a countenance of benign and strong tranquillity.

Ask a hundred people to write about the spring--simply to describe it
with its sights and sounds and odours--and most of them can perform the
task more or less well. Ask them to bring home the physical and
emotional influence of spring, and many of those who feel that influence
most keenly will give up the task. And then comes Chaucer with his few
touches, his "blissful briddes" and "fressche flowres," and tells us how
"full is my heart of revel and solace," and behold! the passage breathes
to the reader's heart the very spirit of youth and springtide.

A simple statement of a simple fact calls for no "literary" gift. A
description of externals demands some, but not often a great, degree of
it. A thought or feeling, which is suggested by the fact or object, may
require either little or much in proportion as the thought or feeling is
fine and fugitive. But a _mood_ induced by the thought or feeling
generally demands the gift in its highest degree. "A primrose by the
river's brim," whether "a yellow primrose 'tis to him," or a
dicotyledon, may be outwardly described more and less well; but we
require for that purpose only the rudiments of literary prose. But,
next, there is the pure and appealing beauty of the flower; and that
evokes gathering recognitions of the beauty of nature and its grace to
us. Then upon this there steals a feeling of exhilaration in the glad
and gay atmosphere of the re-awakening world; and this, again, may open
into a whole vista of recollections far back from childhood; and so the
result may be one of many moods. We have all this time been brought up a
sort of gradient of literary difficulty; and he is the supreme of
supreme literary artists who can body forth the most subtle of all these
thoughts and moods.

Let me illustrate. Take for the purpose of contrast this passage of
purely external description from Cowper:--

Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcerned
The cheerful haunts of man, to wield the axe
And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear,
From morn to eve his solitary task.
Shaggy and lean and shrewd, with pointed ears
And tail cropped short, half lurcher and half cur,
His dog attends him. Close behind his heel
Now creeps he slow, and now with many a frisk,
Wide-scampering, snatches up the drifted snow
With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout:
Then shakes his powde