contrast between the discontented incompleteness of the spirit and the
complete perfection of the style that expresses it forming the chief
element of the aesthetic charm of these particular poems;--and then the
birth of Love, and all the wonder and the fear and the perilous delight
of one on whose boyish brows the little wings of love have beaten for the
first time; and the love-songs, so dainty and delicate, little swallow-
flights of music, and full of such fragrance and freedom that they might
all be sung in the open air and across moving water; and then autumn,
coming with its choirless woods and odorous decay and ruined loveliness,
Love lying dead; and the sense of the mere pity of it.

One might stop there, for from a young poet one should ask for no deeper
chords of life than those that love and friendship make eternal for us;
and the best poems in the volume belong clearly to a later time, a time
when these real experiences become absorbed and gathered up into a form
which seems from such real experiences to be the most alien and the most
remote; when the simple expression of joy or sorrow suffices no longer,
and lives rather in the stateliness of the cadenced metre, in the music
and colour of the linked words, than in any direct utterance; lives, one
might say, in the perfection of the form more than in the pathos of the
feeling. And yet, after the broken music of love and the burial of love
in the autumn woods, we can trace that wandering among strange people,
and in lands unknown to us, by which we try so pathetically to heal the
hurts of the life we know, and that pure and passionate devotion to Art
which one gets when the harsh reality of life has too suddenly wounded
one, and is with discontent or sorrow marring one's youth, just as often,
I think, as one gets it from any natural joy of living; and that curious
intensity of vision by which, in moments of overmastering sadness and
despair ungovernable, artistic things will live in one's memory with a
vivid realism caught from the life which they help one to forget--an old