“Children we twain are,” he could write of himself and his book, “late made wise in love, but in all else most childish still.” Loving the earth and the joy of it, seeking still the pleasure of the eyes, exulting in its visible beauty, the waters gliding through the Hollow Land where the hills are blue, a walled garden in the happy poplar land, with old grey stones over which red apples shone “at the right time of the year” he could always cherish the hope that “our small corner of the world may once again become beautiful and dramatic withal”: because the red apples and grey stones and blue hills were possessions which required for their acceptance no impossible extension of present human achievement. In his vision of satisfaction “now it is a picture of some great room full of merriment,” says a critic, “now of the winepress, now of the golden threshing-floor, now of an old mill among apple trees, now of cool water after heat of the sun, now of some well-sheltered, well-tilled place among woods or mountains, where men and women live happily, knowing of nothing that is too far off or too great for the affections.” The one cloud in the landscape comes from the knowledge that it will change and vanish: that, behind, are always the hurrying of the inexorable hours and the beating of the great wings of Death. But if the transitoriness of love and beauty causes some pang of sadness, the intensity of it is deepened by this conviction of its passing. The shadow creeping slowly over the dial, the vision of bare November with its ruined choirs in the splendour of the August afternoon, can excite a longing wild with all regret. But they can excite also an ever-deepening exultation in Beauty all the more desirable because it is “Beauty that must die”; and a passion for the love and labour of the day because so soon “the night cometh,” when all love and labour are done. * * * * *