and precious is the mere handling of it; or the little lyric interludes
that break in here and there like the singing of a thrush, and are as
swift and as sure as the beating of a bird's wing, as light and bright as
the apple-blossoms that flutter fitfully down to the orchard grass after
a spring shower, and look the lovelier for the rain's tears lying on
their dainty veinings of pink and pearl; or the sonnets--for Mr. Rodd is
one of those qui sonnent le sonnet, as the Ronsardists used to say--that
one called On the Border Hills, with its fiery wonder of imagination and
the strange beauty of its eighth line; or the one which tells of the
sorrow of the great king for the little dead child--well, all these poems
aim, as I said, at producing a purely artistic effect, and have the rare
and exquisite quality that belongs to work of that kind; and I feel that
the entire subordination in our aesthetic movement of all merely
emotional and intellectual motives to the vital informing poetic
principle is the surest sign of our strength.

But it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the aesthetic
demands of the age: there should be also about it, if it is to give us
any permanent delight, the impress of a distinct individuality. Whatever
work we have in the nineteenth century must rest on the two poles of
personality and perfection. And so in this little volume, by separating
the earlier and more simple work from the work that is later and stronger
and possesses increased technical power and more artistic vision, one
might weave these disconnected poems, these stray and scattered threads,
into one fiery-coloured strand of life, noting first a boy's mere
gladness of being young, with all its simple joy in field and flower, in
sunlight and in song, and then the bitterness of sudden sorrow at the
ending by Death of one of the brief and beautiful friendships of one's
youth, with all those unanswered longings and questionings unsatisfied by
which we vex, so uselessly, the marble face of death; the artistic