It has always seemed to me that the transition from the Victorian Age to the experimental age which followed it was marked by the South African War. For a dozen years before that war there had been restless movements in the very heart of the nation; the men who were to be most conspicuous at the close of the century were leavening the nation or being leavened themselves. Joseph Chamberlain appeared as the embodiment of the transitional spirit in the political arena. In journalism the movement took shape in the person of Alfred Harmsworth. In literature the man of the moment was Rudyard Kipling. These three fateful embodiments of the Time-Spirit seemed to dominate England and shake her clean out of her fin-de-siècle complacency. England could never be the same again, after those three men had been at the helm, for however short a period. The course was deflected; the reckoning lost. Austere, dignified Whigs would appear again in politics, but never again would their austerity and dignity represent our political system. Sonorous, sober, highly judicious journalists might still succeed in producing, at great loss, a journal expressing themselves and their views, but no considerable section of the nation would ever again hang upon their words. And even in poetry, which lies so much nearer to the roots of human nature, and might therefore be expected to vary less with the fashions of a time, we cannot but perceive that the private, personal utterances of an Arnold, a Tennyson, a Browning, a Rossetti, would have less chance of being heard in the din of to-day, however sweet the expression, however intimately moving to the spirit. There is a poet belonging to the younger generation who has written lyrics of exquisite grace and charm, who can deal half playfully, half seriously with the lightest of subjects, and make it delicate and entrancing; who can touch the deeper note of the romantic poets and make of it something grim, perplexing, haunting; or can produce in a few stanzas an intimate feeling for persons portrayed in some suggestive aspect. Mr. Walter De la Mare is well known to a small circle of literary persons, but neither his poems nor his prose-writings have been widely read as they should have been.