Dear Menzies, talk of sight and sound, And make us _feel_ the blossom-time. In these more sensuous moods he is so filled with the simple Chaucerian gladsomeness of spring that he can sing, or make one of his characters sing--for after all, his characters are but so many sides of himself-- I have been with the nightingale; I have learned his song so sweet; I sang it aloud by wood and dale, And under my breath in the street. And again-- I can hear in that valley of mine, Loud-voiced on a leafless spray, How the robin sings, flushed with his holly-wine, Of the moonlit blossoms of May. In all such passages there is the genuine note of the vernal joy which stirs naturally in the blood of all men who are men. The writer feels as the birds feel, nay, as the burgeoning hedges feel, when-- The blackbirds with their oboe voices make The sweetest broken music, all about The beauty of the day, for beauty's sake, And all about the mates whose love they won, And all about the sunlight and the sun. Or when-- A passionate nightingale adown the lane Shakes with the force and volume of his song A hawthorn's heaving foliage. But this sensuous rapture, which reminds us of Keats, though of a Keats whose expression is more like that of Shelley, is by no means all that Davidson can feel in nature. Through the eyes and other senses the influence of nature penetrates to his soul and spirit. He touches Wordsworth in such lines as these:-- All my emotion and imagining Were of the finest tissue that is woven, From sense and thought.... I seemed to be created every morn. A golden trumpet pealed along the sky: The sun arose: the whole earth rushed upon me. Sometimes the tree that stroked my windowpane Was more than I could grasp; sometimes my thought Absorbed the universe. It is true that these words are put in the mouth of that one of his dramatis personae who is of the most melancholy and brooding disposition; but he who can make another say-- I am haunted by the heavens and the earth; ... I am besieged by things that I have seen: Followed and watched by rivers; snared and held In labyrinthine woods and tangled meads; Hemmed in by mountains; waylaid by the sun; Environed and beset by moon and stars; Whispered by winds and summoned by the sea. --he who can put this thought in another's mouth has necessarily first experienced some measure of it himself.