It is obvious that Smart's contemporaries and immediate successors looked upon the _Song to David_ as the work of a hopelessly deranged person. In 1763 poetry had to be very sane indeed to be attended to. The year preceding had welcomed the _Shipwreck_ of Falconer, the year to follow would welcome Goldsmith's _Traveller_ and Grainger's _Sugar Cane_, works of various merit, but all eminently sane. In 1763 Shenstone was dying and Rogers was being born. The tidy, spruce, and discreet poetry of the eighteenth century was passing into its final and most pronounced stage. The _Song to David_, with its bold mention of unfamiliar things, its warm and highly-coloured phraseology, its daring adjectives and unexampled adverbs, was an outrage upon taste, and one which was best accounted for by the tap of the forefinger on the forehead. No doubt the poem presented and still may present legitimate difficulties. Here, for instance, is a stanza which it is not for those who run to read: _Increasing days their reign exalt, Nor in the pink and mottled vault The opposing spirits tilt; And, by the coasting reader spy'd, The silverlings and crusions glide For Adoration gilt_. This is charming; but if it were in one of the tongues of the heathen we should get Dr. Verrall to explain it away. Poor Mr. Harvey, the editor of 1819, being hopelessly puzzled by "silverlings," the only dictionary meaning of which is "shekels," explained "crusions" to be some other kind of money, from [Greek: krousis]. But "crusions" are golden carp, and when I was a child the Devonshire fishermen used to call the long white fish with argent stripes (whose proper name, I think, is the launce) a silverling. The "coasting reader" is the courteous reader when walking along the coast, and what he sees are silver fish and gold fish, adoring the Lord by the beauty of their scales. The _Song to David_ is cryptic to a very high degree, but I think there are no lines in it which patient reflection will not solve. On every page are stanzas the verbal splendour of which no lover of poetry will question, and lines which will always, to me at least, retain an echo of that gusto with which I have heard Mr. Browning's strong voice recite them: _The wealthy crops of whitening rice 'Mongst thyine woods and groves of spice, For Adoration grow; And, marshall'd in the fencèd land, The peaches and pomegranates stand, Where wild carnations blow. The laurels with the winter strive; The crocus burnishes alive Upon the snow-clad earth; * * * * * For Adoration ripening canes And cocoa's purest milk detains The westering pilgrim's staff; Where rain in, clasping boughs inclos'd, And vines with oranges dispos'd, Embower the social laugh.