the best elements of both
the classic and the romantic are found working together in harmony. If
Christ were living to-day, is Professor Babbitt quite sure that he himself
would not have censured the anthophilpsychosis of "Consider the lilies of
the field"?

XX.--GEORGIANS

(1) MR. DE LA MARE

Mr. Walter de la Mare gives us no Thames of song. His genius is scarcely
more than a rill. But how the rill shines! How sweet a music it makes!
Into what lands of romance does it flow, and beneath what hedges populous
with birds! It seems at times as though it were a little fugitive stream
attempting to run as far away as possible from the wilderness of reality
and to lose itself in quiet, dreaming places. There never were shyer songs
than these.

Mr. de la Mare is at the opposite pole to poets so robustly at ease with
experience as Browning and Whitman. He has no cheers or welcome for the
labouring universe on its march. He is interested in the daily procession
only because he seeks in it one face, one figure. He is love-sick for
love, for beauty, and longs to save it from the contamination of the
common world. Like the lover in _The Tryst_, he dreams always of a secret
place of love and beauty set solitarily beyond the bounds of the time and
space we know:

Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come,
There, out of all remembrance, make our home:
Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair,
Hollowed by Noah's mouse beneath the chair
Wherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound,
Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound.
Perchance Leviathan of the deep sea
Would lease a lost mermaiden's grot to me,
There of your beauty we would joyance make--
A music wistful for the sea-nymph's sake:
Haply Elijah, o'er his spokes of fire,
Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre,
Spied, tranced in azure of inanest space,
Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace,
Where two might happy be--just you and I--
Lost in the uttermost of Eternity.

This is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry. Even the waltz-songs of
the music-halls express, or attempt to express, the longing of lovers for
an impossible loneliness. Mr. de la Mare touches our hearts, however, not
because he shares our sentimental day-dreams, but because he so mournfully
turns back from them to the bitterness of reality:

No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep
Could lull poor mortal longingness asleep.
Somewhere there Nothi