Thus "The Widow in the Bye Street," which was the first written of these four narrative poems, is the adventure of motherhood. "Oh!" will protest some member of the dainty legion which lives in terror of appearances, "it is a story of lust and murder!" But no; fundamentally, triumphantly, it is a tale of mother-love, venturing all for the child. Only superficially is it a tragedy of ungoverned desire and rage, made out of the incidence of character which we call destiny. The mother's spirit prevails over all that, and remains unconquerable. In "Daffodil Fields" there is the adventure of romantic passion. The "Everlasting Mercy," so obviously as hardly to need the comment, is the high adventure of the soul; and "Dauber," less clearly perhaps, though quite as certainly, is that too. But while in the first of these two poems the spirit's spark is struck into 'absolute human clay,' in "Dauber" it is burning already in the brain of an artist. Saul Kane, when his soul comes to birth at the touch of religion, puts off bestiality and rises to a joyful perception of the meaning of life. The Dauber, with that precious knowledge already shining within him, but twinned with another, the supreme and immortal glory of art, with his last breath cries holy defiance to the elements that snatch his life--_It will go on_. But there is another reason for the popularity of this poet's work; and it also is deducible from the poem called "Biography." I mean the complete and robust humanity which is evinced there. One sees, of course, that this has a close relation with the zest that we have already noted; that it is indeed the root of that fine flower. But the balance of this personality--with power of action and of thought about equally poised, with the mystic and the humanitarian meeting half-way, with the ideal and the real twining and intertwining constantly, with sensuous and spiritual perception almost matched--determines the quality by which Mr Masefield's poems make so wide and direct an appeal. If reflectiveness were predominant, if the subjective element outran the keen dramatic sense, if the ideal were capable of easy victory over the material (it does conquer, but of that later), this would be poetry of a very different type. Whether it would be of a finer type it is idle to speculate, the point for the moment being that it would not command so large an audience. By just so far as specialization operated, the range would be made narrower. It is this sense of humanity which wins; not only explicit, as, for example, in the deliberate choice of subject avowed once for all in the early poem called "Consecration"-- The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies, Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries, ..... The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout, The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout, .....