THE • YEAR'S • AT • THE • SPRING
a hint that something might happen if something else did. It is a suggestion only, but made by one who knows what he thinks, and how to think it. Into a few lines a whole philosophy is concentrated.
Thus Pepler or Ralph Hodgson nudge peoples arms and draw attention to traditional stupidities.
Walter De la Mare puts the children to sleep with "Nod," or bewitches them with the Mad Prince's Song; or he takes us to an Arabia which never existed, but is one of those countries more beautiful than any we know, and therefore we love to imagine it.
Look at that full moon on page 53, which Dick saw "one night." Here is the possible experience of man, woman, child, dog, fox, bear—or even nightingale—all concentrated into the shortest and plainest account of something that happened to Dick. He and Betsey-Jane, though quite different in kind, belong to the same world. Betsey-Jane is plainly more romantic than Dick.
But, talking of the moon, we may turn back to Mr Chesterton on page 36. Here we find something incongruous in the collection: a poem that wishes deliberately to strike a note. The donkey is a much better fellow than Mr Chesterton seems to think: he does not ask for glorification, nor would he utter that boast of the last two lines. Would a man not rather "go with the wild asses to Paradise" than have the case for the donkey pleaded before him in this obtrusive manner?
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