Her mouth was like a soft red rose When Phœbus drinks its dew; But oh, that cruel thorn inside Pierced many a fond heart through. She had a step that walked unheard, It made the stones like grass; Yet that light step has crushed a heart, As light as that step was. Those glowing eyes, those smiling lips, I have lived now to prove Were not for me, were not for me, But came of her self-love. Yet, like a cow for acorns that Have made it suffer pain, So, though her charms are poisonous, I moan for them again. In any other poet the cow and the acorns would be an intolerable extravagance; but not so from Mr. Davies, who knows and loves all beasts of the field; who knows what it is to tramp over stones and to tread the grass, so that his "stones like grass" rings freshly, while the dew-drinking Phœbus is stale. But if he seems to belong to an older tradition, and to have little in common with the self-conscious modern poet, that is only because his life has kept him away from the fashions and fashionable ideas which are the intellectual superficies of our time, which distinguish the culture of one age from the culture of another. He loves with the strength of intimate friendship the unchanging things in the natural world, the sea, things that grow, and animals and birds. And he is acquainted with the other unchanging things--love, the desire for food, hatred of death, friendship. He is also too keen in his sympathies and interests not to be modern in the sense, for instance, that the romantic appeal has had its effect on him, or that the ugly facts of modern life have stirred and pained him. There is a great variety of emotions registered in his poems. There is the grim ballad called _Treasures_. There is a bold union of magical romanticism and sensuous passion in the poem beginning: I met her in the leafy woods, Early a summer's night; I saw her white teeth in the dark, There was no better light. There is a remarkable confidence and elation in the little poem _The Elements_, wherein he identifies himself with Nature--it could only be quoted entire. And he records his impression of a tramcar which sweeps along Westminster in the twilight carrying its load of sleeping men to work. He can also write in a vein wholly unlike that of his simple and more characteristic lyrical verses. Thus he describes his childish impressions of a mariner "no good in port or out," as his granddad said: