The pleasant ditch is a milky way, So alight with stars it is, And over it breaks, like pale sea-spray, The laughing cataract of the may In luminous harmonies. (Cloak with a flower-wrought veil The face of the dream-country. The fields of the moon are kind, are pale, And quiet is she.) Thus, too, in the third stanza, the recurrent idea of an alien spirit is caught into imagery which glows with light and colour: imagery so simple and sensuous as almost to mock abstraction and quite to disguise it; but bearing at its heart the essence of a philosophy. Again the soul is imagined as standing at the barrier of the two countries, when reality has melted to an apparition and the sense of that other realm has grown acute. Bereft of the comfortable earth, but powerless still to enter the dream-country: standing lonely and fearful at the cold verge of the mystic region, the spirit will seek to draw about it the garment of appearance: I will weave, of the clear clean shapes of things, A curtain to shelter me; I will paint it with kingcups and sunrisings, And glints of blue for the swallow's wings, And green for the apple-tree. (Oh, a whisper has pierced the veil Out of the dream-country, As a wind moans in the straining sail Of a ship lost at sea.) In reading this poem, and in others too, one is struck by the hold which the real world has upon our poet. It is a surprising fact in one of so speculative a turn, and is the clearest sign by which we recognize her work as of our time and no other. Her thought may be projected very far, but her feet are generally upon solid ground. Perhaps I ought rather to say that they are always there; for it is more than probable that bed-rock may exist in two or three poems where I have been unable to get down to it. It is in any case safe to say that a sense of reality--shown in human sympathy and tenderness for lowly creatures, in love of nature and perception of beauty, in truth to fact, in a touch of shrewd insight and a sense of humour bred of the habit of detachment--is very strong. I do not suggest that these qualities are everywhere apparent. By their nature they are such as could not often enter into the framework of poems so subtly wrought. But they are woven into the texture of the poet's mentality, and have even directed its method. So that, remote as may be the idea upon which she is working, it is generally brought within the range of sight; and, intangible though it may seem, it is given definite and charming shape. And if there were not one obvious proof of this steady anchorage, we might have happy assurance of it in the clarity and precision of her thought. But fortunately there _is_ obvious proof. There is, for instance, this delicious passage in the poem from which I have just quoted, surely proving a kinship with our own 'blind country' as close as with that other and something dearer: