What is the piper piping when the thin sweet sound comes down the valley like water dripping from stair to rocky stair, or “petals from blown roses on the grass”? You do not need to guess. You know it is in absolute accord with the night breeze and the long shadows and the hylas fluting in the year. It is music only, and all your heart answers is: “Piper, pipe that song again.” Here, too, is that poignant lament, To a Dog’s Memory. “The gusty morns are here, When all the reeds ride low with level spear; And on such nights as lured us far of yore, Down rocky alleys yet, and through the pine, The Hound-star and the pagan Hunter shine; But I and thou, ah, field-fellow of mine, Together roam no more.” All Matthew Arnold’s musical place names in Thyrsis and The Scholar Gypsy: the “Ilsley Downs”, “the track by Childsworth Farm”, “the Cumner range”, “the stripling Thames at Bablock Hythe”—these are emulated in a not inferior accent in the sombre music of this threnody. Almost, remembering the flowers in Lycidas, you long to strew them on her darling’s grave. “There is a music fills The oaks of Belmont and the Wayland hills Southward to Dewing’s little bubbly stream,—— The heavenly weather’s call! Oh, who alive Hastes not to start, delays not to arrive, Having free feet that never felt a gyve Weigh, even in a dream?” For those who knew her this poem carries a footnote of poignant history. She was in London when letters came from home, and were opened in a quaint restaurant, the Apple Tree Inn, a vegetarian resort where three merry souls were met to be glad over lentils and strange innocences of diet cunningly spiced to resemble the ensanguined viands repudiated and abhorred. She opened her letter and read, and her young—always young and childlike—face trembled into an unbelieving grief. She could not speak. The day was dead for her and those for whom she would have made the constant spark in it and afterward the memory. On the heels of the ill tidings she went with one friend to whom she could not tell the news, but whom she asked not to leave her, to Hampstead Heath, and the two sat all the afternoon in silence on a secluded slope, their feet in English green and her eyes unseeingly on the sky. Her dog was dead. There are those for whom the conduct of life, either a passion or a malaise, according to individual temperament, transcends even the magic of pure fancy. For them there are trumpet calls in this book, perhaps the most widely known and praised, The Kings, its last stanza the battle-cry of the faint yet brave: “To fear not possible failure, Nor covet the game at all, But fighting, fighting, fighting, Die, driven against the wall.” This is metal for sounding clarions. And so too is The Knight Errant: the second stanza an epitome of grand quotable abstractions: