beauty-beam" that I missed before. It would be impossible to translate
it into prose; it would lose half its interest, and all of its charm.
It would be easier to translate Tennyson's _Dora_ into prose than
_The Daffodil Fields._ In fact, I have often thought that if the
story of _Dora_ were told in concise prose, in the manner of Guy
de Maupassant, it would distinctly gain in force.

No poet, with any claim to the name, can be accurately labelled by an
adjective or a phrase. You may think you know his "manner," and he
suddenly develops a different one; this you call his "later" manner,
and he disconcerts you by harking back to the "earlier," or trying
something, that if you must have labels, you are forced to call his
"latest," knowing now that it is subject to change without notice. Mr.
Masefield published _The Everlasting Mercy_ in 1911; _The Widow
in the Bye Street_ in 1912; _Dauber_ in 1912; _The Daffodil
Fields_ in 1913. We had him classified. He was a writer of
sustained narrative, unscrupulous in the use of language, bursting
with vitality, sacrificing anything and everything that stood in the
way of his effect. This was "red blood" verse raised to poetry by
sheer inspiration, backed by remarkable skill in the use of rime. We
looked for more of the same thing from him, knowing that in this
particular field he had no rival.

Then came the war. As every soldier drew his sword, every poet drew
his pen. And of all the poems published in the early days of the
struggle, none equalled in high excellence _August 1914,_ by John
Masefield. And its tone was precisely the opposite of what his most
famous efforts had led us to expect. It was not a lurid picture of
wholesale murder, nor a bottle of vitriol thrown in the face of the
Kaiser. After the thunder and the lightning, came the still small