His advice was taken, and the last of the edition of five hundred copies went off quickly at these prices. So enriched, the poet quitted his lodging-house and went home into Wales for a holiday, and while there began the first of his prose books, “The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp,” which was published in 1908 with an introduction by George Bernard Shaw. Meanwhile, Davies had written two other volumes of verse, and his recognition as one of the truest, most individual of living lyrists was no longer in doubt. Mr. Shaw notes of his prose that it has not the academic correctness dear to the Perfect Commercial Letter Writer, but is “worth reading by literary experts for its style alone”; and much the same may be said of his poetry. It is not flawless, but its faults are curiously in harmony with its unstudied simplicity and often strangely heighten the beauty of thought and language to which verses flower as carelessly as if he thought and said his finest things by accident. He has the countryman’s intimacy with Nature--not for nothing did he work on farms, tramp the open roads, sleep under the naked sky--knows all her varying moods, has observed trivial significances in her that the deliberate student overlooks; and he writes of her with an Elizabethan candor and fantasy and a natural, simple diction that is an art in Wordsworth. He has made a selection from his several volumes in a Collected Edition, but has published other verse since. For some years after his success he lived in London, but never seemed at home; he has no liking for streets and shrinks from crowds; and now has withdrawn again into the country, where our ultra modern Georgian poets who, despite the fact that he is in the tradition of the great lyrists of the past, were constrained to embrace him as one of themselves, are less likely to infect him with their artifices. WALTER DE LA MARE [Illustration: WALTER DE LA MARE] Except in the personal sense--and the charm of his gracious personality would surely surround him with friends, whether he wanted them or not--Walter de la Mare is, like Hardy, a lonely figure in modern English poetry--no other poet of our time has a place more notably apart from his contemporaries. You might almost read an allegory of this aloofness into his “Myself”: “There is a garden grey With mists of autumntide; Under the giant boughs, Stretched green on every side, “Along the lonely paths, A little child like me, With face, with hands like mine, Plays ever silently.... “And I am there alone: Forlornly, silently, Plays in the evening garden Myself with me.”