this article, seems to me almost unrivalled in its delicate, unemphatic pathos. It exemplifies one of Mr. Housman's strongest and rarest qualities-his unerring dramatic instinct. In the way of pure contemplation, apart from drama, these four stanzas are almost as good:

When I watch the living meet,

And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street

Where I lodge a little while,

If the heats of hate and lust

In the house of flesh are strong,
Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.

In the nation that is not

Nothing stands that stood before;
There revenges are forgot,

And the hater hates no more;

Lovers lying two by two

Ask not whom they sleep beside,

And the bridegroom all night through

Never turns him to the bride.

It is long since we have caught just this note in English verse-the note of intense feeling uttering itself in language of unadorned precision, uncontorted truth. Mr. Housman is a vernacular poet, if ever there was one. He employs scarcely a word that is not understanded of the people, and current on their lips. For this very reason, some readers who have come to regard decoration, and even contortion, as of the essence of poetry, may need time to acquire the taste for Mr. Housman's simplicity. But if he is vernacular, he is also classical in the best sense of the word. His simplicity is not that of weakness, but of strength and skill. He eschews extrinsic and factitious ornament because he knows how to attain beauty without it. It is good to mirror a thing in figures, but it is at least as good to express the thing itself in its essence, always provided, of course, that

the method be that of poetic synthesis, not of scientific analysis. Mr. Housman has this talent in a very high degree; and cognate and complementary to it is his remarkable gift of reticence-of aposiopesis, if I may wrest the term from its rhetorical sense and apply it to poetry. He will often say more by a cunning silence than many another poet by pages of speech. That is how he has contrived to get into his tiny volume so much of the very essence and savour of life.

As I re-read Mr. Housman's poems after an interval of three years or so, I have a curious feeling of having quoted the wrong things. Not that I admire these things less, but that I admire others more. One may safely say, at any rate, that every poem here singled out could be replaced by another of equal merit without by any means exhausting the wealth even of so small a book. There is no reason why Mr. Housman should not put off his rustic mask and widen the range of his subject matter. I trust he will do so in other and larger volumes. But even should he be content to remain merely "A Shropshire Lad," his place among English poets is secure.

BREDON HILL.

In summer time on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.

Here of a Sunday morning
My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured counties,
And hear the larks so high
About us in the sky.

The bells would ring to call her

In valleys miles away:

Come all to church, good people;
Good people, come and pray."
But here my love would stay.

And I would turn and answer

Among the springing thyme, "Oh, peal upon our wedding,

And we will hear the chime,
And come to church in time."

But when the snows at Christmas
On Bredon top were strown,
My love rose up so early

And stole out unbeknown

And went to church alone.

They tolled the one bell only,
Groom there was none to see,
The mourners followed after,
And so to church went she,
And would not wait for me.

* Pronounced Breedon.

The bells they sound on Bredon,
And still the steeples hum:
"Come all to church, good people ".
Oh, noisy bells, be dumb;

I hear you, I will come.

From far, from eve and morning

And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me

Blew hither: here am I.

Now for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart-
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind's twelve quarters
I take my endless way.

LAURENCE HOUSMAN

THE distinction of Mr. Laurence Housman's workmanship, the nimbleness of his fancy, and the sombre strength of his imagination, must be patent to all readers of Green Arras and Spikenard. No one is more authentically a poet than he; yet the forms of thought which almost exclusively preoccupy him are to me so foreign, and, to be quite frank, so uninteresting, that I must own myself incapable of doing full justice even to his purely literary merits. He envisages the world from a point of view at which I cannot place myself, even in momentary make-believe. I lack all clue, in my own experience, to the processes of his mind. Consequently, I can but apologise in advance for the inadequate and perhaps utterly mistaken appreciation of his talent which is all I can offer. In the preface to his All Fellows, a book of prose legends "with insets of verse," Mr. Housman says, "Unfortunately there are to be found, to sit in judgment, minds of a literal persuasion, that take from the artist his own soul, to set it in the image that he has made." In what I have to say I may fall into this But a single attitude of mind is so consistently maintained throughout Mr. Housman's verse, that it is impossible to conceive it a mere artistic pose.

On the contrary, it seems to me that sincerity is what distinguishes Mr. Housman from most of his school. His kinship with Rossetti, for example, is unmistakable; but