seemed to wear a certain look--an extra-territorial look, let us call it.
They are suspect. One is inclined to shake a doubtful head at them.

And the landowner feels it. He knows quite well, though he may not say
so, that the Corot trees, though they do not dwell upon margins, are in
spirit almost as extra-territorial as the rushes. In proof of this he
very often cuts them down, out of the view, once for all. The view is
better, as a view, without them. Though their roots are in his ground
right enough, there is a something about their heads--. But the reason
he gives for wishing them away is merely that they are "thin." A man
does not always say everything.




A NORTHERN FANCY


"I remember," said Dryden, writing to Dennis, "I remember poor Nat Lee,
who was then upon the verge of madness, yet made a sober and witty answer
to a bad poet who told him, 'It was an easy thing to write like a
madman.' 'No,' said he, ''tis a very difficult thing to write like a
madman, but 'tis a very easy thing to write like a fool.'" Nevertheless,
the difficult song of distraction is to be heard, a light high note, in
English poetry throughout two centuries at least, and one English poet
lately set that untethered lyric, the mad maid's song, flying again.

A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries--the age of the re-discovery of death; against the
crime of tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that had made