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 lodgings and
questionings unsatisfied by which we vex, so uselessly, the marble
face of death; the artistic 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