ng is; and there lost Man
Shall win what changeless vague of peace he can.

These lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective vagueness of
phrase, which is Mr. de la Mare's peculiar vice as a poet) suggests
something of the sad philosophy which runs through the verse in _Motley_.
The poems are, for the most part, praise of beauty sought and found in the
shadow of death.

Melancholy though it is, however, Mr. de la Mare's book is, as we have
said, a book of praise, not of lamentations. He triumphantly announces
that, if he were to begin to write of earth's wonders:

Flit would the ages
On soundless wings
Ere unto Z
My pen drew nigh;
Leviathan told,
And the honey-fly.

He cannot come upon a twittering linnet, a "thing of light," in a bush
without realizing that--

All the throbbing world
Of dew and sun and air
By this small parcel of life
Is made more fair.

He bids us in _Farewell_:

Look thy last on all things lovely
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing.

Thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in Mr. de la Mare's melancholy. His
sorrow is idealist's sorrow. He has the heart of a worshipper, a lover.

We find evidence of this not least in his war-verses. At the outbreak of
the war he evidently shared with other lovers and idealists the feeling of
elation in the presence of noble sacrifices made for the world.

Now each man's mind all Europe is,

he cries, in the first line in _Happy England_, and, as he remembers the
peace of England, "her woods and wilds, her loveliness," he exclaims:

O what a deep contented night
The sun from out her Eastern seas
Would bring the dust which in her sight
Had given its all for these!

So beautiful a spirit as Mr. de la Mare's, however, could not remain
content with idealizing from afar the sacrifices and heroism of dying men.
In the long poem called _Motley_ he turns from the heroism to the madness
of war, translating his vision into a fool's song:

Nay, but a dream I had
Of a world all mad,
Not simply happy mad like me,
Who am mad like an empty scene
Of water and willow-tree,
Where the wind hath been;
But that foul Satan-mad,
Who rots in his own head....

The fool's vision of men going into battle is not a vision of knights of
the Holy Ghost nobly falling in the lists with their country looking on,
but of men'