Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.

The point of view expressed in _The Carpenter's Son_ is
singularly detached not only from conventional religious belief, but
from conventional reverence. But the originality in _A Shropshire
Lad_, while more strikingly displayed in some poems than in others,
leaves its mark on them all. It is the originality of a man who thinks
his own thoughts with shy obstinacy, makes up his mind in secret
meditation, quite unaffected by current opinion. It is not the poetry
of a rebel; it is the poetry of an independent man, too indifferent to
the crowd even to fight them. And now and then we find a lyric of
flawless beauty, that lingers in the mind like the glow of a sunset.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went,
And cannot come again.

Mr. Housman's poems are nearer to the twentieth century in spirit than
the work of the late Victorians, and many of them are curiously
prophetic of the dark days of the present war. What strange vision