Wordsworth, whose poetry at times may seem dull and uninspired, again and again has the power to write lines which have a beauty that is inexplicable. The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose; The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; . . . . . Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; . . . . . Hence, in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. These lines are taken from Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality". In another poem he describes a great mountain, Mont Blanc, which is snow-capped, so high that the sun when it rises shines on the mountain's summit long before the sun's rays reach the country below. One line of seven words tells us how at night the mountain peak seems to be in the company of the moving stars:-- "Visited all night by troops of stars." Shakespeare has many of these magic lines, but one which seems to have come from nowhere, and for which Shakespeare offers no explanation is: "Child Rowland to the dark tower came." {227} We ask ourselves who Child Rowland was, and where was the dark tower. Then, perhaps, we begin to weave a story about Child Rowland and the tower, for poetry often stirs in us something which makes us think and feel more intensely, and awakens in us the desire to create beauty ourselves. It was Thomas Nash, a poet living at the same time as Shakespeare, who wrote in his poem "In Time of Pestilence", lines which many other poets agree are among the most enthralling and beautiful ever written,-- Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eye; George Meredith, the novelist, who also was a poet, in his "Love in the Valley" has magical lines. Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Robert Louis Stevenson told the Irish poet, Mr. Yeats, that when he first read "Love in the Valley" he went about the country where he was shouting the lines for joy in them. And so we finally understand that this power of creating strange beauty which stirs and thrills us all may come to any poet, sometimes to great poets, sometimes to poets not so great. Shakespeare and Nash had it, Keats and Wordsworth, Meredith who belongs almost to our own times, and a young poet of a later time even than {228} Meredith, James Elroy Flecker, in whose play _Hassan_, are many beautiful songs. The last song is "The Golden Road to Samarkand".