Rossetti believed that “Poetry should seem to the hearer to have been always present to his thought, but never before heard,” and the statement that this has been accomplished (so just, sometimes, is popular instinct) is the commonest praise accorded to individual works of art. Many of Mr. Davies’ readers must have said, rightly, but, critically speaking, with imperfect accuracy, “Now that expresses what I have always felt.” They should have said, “That enables me to feel what I always could have felt.” For they have never truly felt it. That wistful, regretful moment, now articulate, was carried unhappily past them in the general flux of incompletely conscious life. They suspected a possibility of feeling something, of knowing what they dimly felt, but it eluded them in the tangled currents of the stream, and they did not detain it, _know_ it, and make it part of themselves. Mr. Davies has not so allowed it to escape; he warily netted it in his consciousness, _learnt_ it accurately and fully, and wrote that poem, thus isolating it for ever from unconsciousness. And we, reading those words, collaborate with him in the re-creation of the work of art for whose notation they serve, and, with our memories behind us, not his, ourselves win out of the river of unconsciousness such a moment, different a little from his, our own, filled delicately with our vitality, and giving us, for the vitality we have given it, an increased consciousness of the life that is in ourselves. The conscious life of art does not imply what is known with contempt as self-consciousness, which means a hampering inability to forget not self but other people’s eyes. It implies a new reading of the Delphic command, γνῶθι σεαυτόν. It does not mean Know thy opinions only, nor yet, Know what are thy desires, but Know thy life, not thy biography but thy living, thine innumerable acts of life.