You feel the mystery of the thing beginning at the second stanza, but not until you get to the sixth stanza do you begin to perceive it. This is not a living woman, but a ghost. The whole poetry of the composition is here. What does the poet mean? He has not told us anywhere, and it is better that he should not have told us, because we can imagine so many things, so many different circumstances, which the poem would equally well illustrate. Were this the fancy of a young man, we might say that the phantom love means the ideal wife, the unknown bride of the future, the beautiful dream that every young man makes for himself about a perfectly happy home. Again, we might suppose that the spirit bride is not really related at all to love in the common-sense, but figures or symbolises only the devotion of the poet to poetry, in which case the spirit bride is art. But the poet is not a young man; he is an old country doctor, coming home late every night from visiting his patients, tired, weary, but with plenty of work to do in his private study. Who, then, may be the shadowy woman with the long black hair always waiting for him alone? Perhaps art, perhaps a memory, most likely the memory of a dead wife, and we may even imagine, the mother of the little boy about whose death the poet has so beautifully written elsewhere. I do not pretend to explain; I do not want to explain; I am only anxious to show you that this composition fulfils one of the finest conditions of poetry, by its suggestiveness. It leaves many questions to be answered in fancy, and all of them are beautiful. Let me now take a little piece about the singing of the nightingale. I think you remember that I read to you, and commented upon Keats's poem about the nightingale. That is the greatest English poem, the most perfect, the most unapproachable of poems upon the nightingale. And after that, only a very, very skilful poet dare write seriously about the nightingale, for his work, if at all imperfect, must suffer terribly by comparison with the verses of Keats. But Robert Bridges has actually come very near to the height of Keats in a three stanza poem upon the same subject. The treatment of the theme is curiously different. The poem of Keats represents supreme delight, the delight which is so great that it becomes sad. The poem of Bridges is slightly dark. The mystery of the bird song is the fact that he chiefly considers; and he considers it in a way that leaves you thinking a long time after the reading of the verses. The suggestions of the composition, however, can best be considered after we have read the verses. NIGHTINGALES Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come, And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams, wherefrom Ye learn your song: Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there, Among the flowers, which in that heavenly air Bloom the year long!