A peasant was in the dock for a violent assault. The clerk read the indictment with all its legal jargon. The prisoner to the warder: "What's all that he says?" _Warder:_ "He says ye hit Pat Curry with yer spade on the side of his head." _Prisoner:_ "Bedad an' I did." _Warder:_ "Then plade not guilty." This dialogue, loud and in the full hearing of the court. Read Wordsworth's two poems on Burns; kind, merciful, steady, glowing, manly they are, with some strong phrases, good lines, and human feeling all through, winding up in two stanzas at the close. These are among the pieces that make Wordsworth a poet to live with; he repairs the daily wear and tear, puts back what the fret of the day has rubbed thin or rubbed off, sends us forth in the morning _whole_. Robert Browning, whose normality in appearance and conversation pleased sensible folk and shocked idolaters, summed up in two stanzas the difference between the popular conception of a poet and the real truth. One might almost take the first stanza as representing the Irish and the second the English temperament. "Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke: Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed, Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke Vitalising virtue: song would song succeed Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet-soul!" Indeed? Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after age Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage. People who never grow up may have a certain kind of fascination, but they will not write great poetry. It is exactly the other way with creative artists; they grow up faster than the average. The maturity of Keats is astonishing.... Mr. Yeats's wonderful lamentation, _September 1913_, that sounds like the wailing of the wind, actually gives us a reason why Irishmen are getting the attention of the world in poetry, as well as in fiction and drama. What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone; For men were born to pray and save, Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave. Yet they were of a different kind. The names that stilled your childish play They have gone about the world like wind, But little time had they to pray For whom the hangman's rope was spun, And what, God help us, could they save; Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.