But it is not merely about external nature that our Fleet Street journalists talk. They speak of such questions of man and life and destiny as are wont to engage any gathering of thoughtful men, and particularly those who are poetically disposed. The contrasts between the beauty of rural nature and the squalor of life, especially the life of the town, these and other matters receive such suggestive treatment as can be given to them by a poet who has no desire to become a preacher, and no desire to pose as an exhaustive philosopher. Upon such questions the many-sided poet, whose sympathies are wide, and whose moods are varied, will touch with a certain suggestiveness; he will flash a ray of cheerfulness into the haunts of pessimism, or throw a new pathos into common situations. And Mr. Davidson possesses a large measure of this many-sidedness, this versatility of sympathy. He appears a very human man, a man unfettered by cant or creed, observing men and things from various sides, and entering into their circumstance. Is he without a creed? From his verses on the _Making of a Poet_ it would appear so-- No creed for me! I am a man apart: A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world; * * * * * A martyr for all mundane moods to tear; The slave of every passion, and the slave Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light; A trembling lyre for every wind to sound. I am a man set to overhear The inner harmony, the very tune Of nature's heart; to be a thoroughfare For all the pageantry of Time: to catch The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour And make them known. * * * * * Nevertheless he, or one of his avatars, can also say of the celebration of Christmas with its "sweet thoughts and deeds"-- A fearless, ruthless, wanton band, Deep in our hearts we guard from scathe Of last year's log a smouldering brand, To light at Yule the fire of faith. He makes no vulgar boast about escaping from the fetters of religion. He spares us any flouts of intellectual superiority. He is apparently an evolutionist, but withal finds little saving grace in that doctrine, and is not uninclined to envy the old days When Heaven and Hell were nigh. It is true that behind his Basil and Herbert and Brian and Sandy and Menzies and Ninian, who converse there in Fleet Street, we find it hard to discover any definite synthetic philosophy of Davidson himself. On the other hand, we have no particular wish to discover one. He is a poet, not a Herbert Spencer. We may reasonably be content to catch the side-lights which a poet throws from a large and liberal nature; to be led by him to different points of view. If the result is that we find the man himself to evade us, we can only admit that the same result occurs with Shakespeare. Indeed, there is a hint that a synthetic philosophy is exactly what Davidson never seeks to attain. Says Ninian:--