In the spring time,
The only pretty ring time
When birds do sing,
Hey ding a ding ding.

sung in the very joy of its heart by a childlike and poetic soul. Both
are poetry: but one is poetry of the drawing-room, the other of the
fields and forests; one is pretence, the other reality; the latter is
hardly poetry at all, and cannot be criticized logically; it is rather
human feeling finding its natural expression in verse of greater or
less perfection according to the skill of the versifier, but always
truthful, never posing, using no sophistic formulas, meaning just what
it says.

These preliminary remarks were necessary because I am sure that it is
to the narrow notions of classical elegance prevailing in England, and
to the want of sympathy with nature and the children of nature, that
so many fail to understand Wagner. German art, at least all that was
produced before the Franco-German war, is redolent of nature. When
reading a volume of typically German songs such as _des Knaben
Wunderhorn_ (whether they are technically genuine _Volkslieder_ or
not, is of no consequence) one feels as if one were walking through
a German forest. Even in the art which is necessarily confined within
a room the artist's mind seems to be wandering outside, and the
portrait-painter will admit through some open window or crevice a
breeze from field and forest beyond. In the same spirit the musicians,
and particularly the most German of all, Bach, Haydn, Schubert,
Beethoven, delight in the rhythms of the popular dance. Of all modern
composers Wagner was the most _volksthuemlich_; the roots of his