Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come, There, out of all remembrance, make our home: Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair, Hollowed by Noah's mouse beneath the chair Wherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound, Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound. Perchance Leviathan of the deep sea Would lease a lost mermaiden's grot to me, There of your beauty we would joyance make-- A music wistful for the sea-nymph's sake: Haply Elijah, o'er his spokes of fire, Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre, Spied, tranced in azure of inanest space, Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace, Where two might happy be--just you and I-- Lost in the uttermost of Eternity. This is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry. Even the waltz-songs of the music-halls express, or attempt to express, the longing of lovers for an impossible loneliness. Mr. de la Mare touches our hearts, however, not because he shares our sentimental day-dreams, but because he so mournfully turns back from them to the bitterness of reality: No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep Could lull poor mortal longingness asleep. Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost Man Shall win what changeless vague of peace he can. These lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective vagueness of phrase, which is Mr. de la Mare's peculiar vice as a poet) suggests something of the sad philosophy which runs through the verse in _Motley_. The poems are, for the most part, praise of beauty sought and found in the shadow of death. Melancholy though it is, however, Mr. de la Mare's book is, as we have said, a book of praise, not of lamentations. He triumphantly announces that, if he were to begin to write of earth's wonders: Flit would the ages On soundless wings Ere unto Z My pen drew nigh; Leviathan told, And the honey-fly. He cannot come upon a twittering linnet, a "thing of light," in a bush without realizing that-- All the throbbing world Of dew and sun and air By this small parcel of life Is made more fair. He bids us in _Farewell_: Look thy last on all things lovely Every hour. Let no night Seal thy sense in deathly slumber Till to delight Thou have paid thy utmost blessing. Thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in Mr. de la Mare's melancholy. His sorrow is idealist's sorrow. He has the heart of a worshipper, a lover. We find evidence of this not least in his war-verses. At the outbreak of the war he evidently shared with other lovers and idealists the feeling of elation in the presence of noble sacrifices made for the world. Now each man's mind all Europe is, he cries, in the first line in _Happy England_, and, as he remembers the peace of England, "her woods and wilds, her loveliness," he exclaims: O what a deep contented night The sun from out her Eastern seas Would bring the dust which in her sight Had given its all for these!