My way of life led me to London town, And difficulties, which I overcame; or-- But yet my waking intuition, That longed to execute its mission. It is extremely difficult to realise that the same man wrote these sorry lines who, in another place, adopts this for his style-- ... Here spring appears Caught in a leafless brake, her garland torn, Breathless with wonder, and the tears half dried Upon her rosy cheek. For our comfort and his let us remember that it was the same Wordsworth who wrote both the _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ and also the lines-- I've measured it from side to side: It's three feet long and two feet wide! Nevertheless flaws of this kind are few, and it is almost unfair for me to be the means perhaps of conveying even thus much impression of faultiness about verses which sustain so high a general level of excellence of language. In point of melody and harmony and flow of verse there can be no doubt that our poet is, for instance, an excellent writer of songs, in which a vigorous simplicity is the prime requisite. They lilt along with great vivacity and ease. But elsewhere I could wish that here and there he would amend his rhymes. "Reviewer" and "literature," "pierced" and "athirst," "noise" and "voice," "inquisition" and "division," "trees" and "palaces," "shade is" and "ladies," "giftless" and "swiftness," are far from pleasing; and though I am almost ashamed to play the detective in work which is mostly full of charm, I find myself distressed by such cacophonies as-- Hid in its hoard of haws, and-- Pierces a rushlight's ray's length into it. John Davidson, then, is a genuine son of his age; free in his thought, wide in his sympathies, eager for the amelioration of man's estate, divided between the hopes of science and the regret for a lost religion, compelled to fall back on the everlasting consolations of love and nature, an ardent lover of the country and its sights and sounds, constrained to draw word-pictures of the things which thus delight him, and drawing them with the consummate skill of the man who keeps his eye on the essentials of the thing he draws. His charm lies in his frank sincerity, and in the clear healthy sweetness of his utterance. That he is a poet none can doubt; if he is comparatively young, as I surmise he is, and if he pursues his true development, he may, I believe, easily take his place in the first rank, not only as a successor, but as the successor, of Tennyson.