The presence of Arthur B. Davies, and conversation with him convince one that poetry and art are in no sense a diversion or a delusion even. They are an occupation, a real business for intelligent men and women. He is occupied with the essential qualities of poetry and painting. He is eclectic by instinct. Spiritually he arrives at his conviction through these unquestionable states of lyrical existence. He is there when they happen. That is authenticity sufficient. They are not wandering moods. They are organized conditions and attitudes, intellectually appreciated and understood. He is a mystic only in the sense that perhaps all lyrical poetry is mystic, since it strives for union with the universal soul in things. It is perfectly autobiographical, the work of Arthur B. Davies, and that is so with all genuine expression. You find this gift for conviction in powerful painter types, like Courbet and Delacroix, who are almost propagandic in their fiercely defined insistence upon the chosen esthetic principle. Whatever emanation, illusion, or "aura," dreadful word that it is, springing from the work of Davies, is only typical of what comes from all magical intentions, the magic of the world of not-being, made real through the operation of true fancy. Davies' pictures are works of fancy, then, in contradistinction to the essays of the imagination such as those of William Blake. Poets like Davies are lookers-in. Poets like Blake are the austere residents of the country they wander in. The lookers-in are no less genuine. They merely "make" their world. It might be said they make the prosaic world over again, transform it by a system of prescribed magic. This work, then, becomes states of fancy dramatized in lyric metre. Davies feels the visionary life of facts as a scientist would feel them actually. He has the wish for absolute order and consistency. There is nothing vague or disconcerting in his work, no lapses of rhetoric. It is, in its way, complete, one may say, since it is the intelligently contrived purpose of this poet to arrive at a scheme of absolute spiritual harmony.