One may dip into the out-of-door verse at random and come away with a picture; witness this “Meadow Fancy”: In the meadows yonder the wingéd wind Makes billows along the grain; With their sequence swift they bring to mind The swash of the open main, Till I smell the pungent brine, and hear— Mine eyes grown dim—the cry Of the sailor lads, and feel vague fear Of the storm-wrack in the sky. While the metaphorical idea in these strophes is not new, they record with freehand strokes one of those suddenly suggestive moods that nature assumes, one of the swift similitudes she flashes before us as with conscious delight. Mr. Burton’s nature-outlook is all open-air vision; no office desk looms darkly behind it, as is sometimes the case in his other verse. It is the sort of inspiration that descends upon one when he is afoot with his vision, roaming afield with beauty. A leaf torn hastily from a notebook serves to catch the fleeting spell; magnetism tips the pencil; and ink and type, those dread non-conductors of impulse, cannot retard or neutralize its current. This is, in a word, the charm that rests upon the little volume, _Dumb In June_, in its various subjects. It would be idle to assert that it is as strong work as Mr. Burton has done; but it is vivid and magnetic, and touched but lightly with the _weltschmerz_ which life is sure to cast upon maturer work. There is pain, but it is merely artist-pain, in the ode that gives its name to the collection. Among the few love poems in Mr. Burton’s first volume, “The Awakening” is one of the truest in feeling; “Values” one of the blithest and daintiest; “Still Days and Stormy,” reminiscent of Emily Dickinson in manner, one of the most delicate, catching in charming phrase one of the unanalyzed moods of love. The earlier volume has also a captivating poem in the lighter vein, that sings itself into the memory by its lilting rhythm and graceful rhyme-scheme, as well as by its subject. It is the story of Shakespeare’s going a-wooing “Across the Fields to Anne”: How often in the summer-tide, His graver business set aside, Has stripling Will, the thoughtful-eyed, As to the pipe of Pan, Stepped blithesomely with lover’s pride Across the fields to Anne. It must have been a merry mile, This summer stroll by hedge and stile, With sweet foreknowledge all the while How sure the pathway ran To dear delights of kiss and smile, Across the fields to Anne. The silly sheep that graze to-day, I wot, they let him go his way, Nor once looked up, as who should say: “It is a seemly man.” For many lads went wooing aye Across the fields to Anne. The oaks, they have a wiser look; Mayhap they whispered to the brook: “The world by him shall yet be shook, It is in nature’s plan; Though now he fleets like any rook Across the fields to Anne.”