And I am sure, that on some hour Coquetting soft ’twixt sun and shower, He stooped and broke a daisy-flower With heart of tiny span, And bore it as a lover’s dower Across the fields to Anne. While from her cottage garden-bed She plucked a jasmine’s goodlihede, To scent his jerkins brown instead; Now since that love began, What luckier swain than he who sped Across the fields to Anne? _Dumb In June_ has many foregleams of the wider vision which distinguishes Mr. Burton’s present work, as shown in his sonnet upon the Christ-head by Angelo, in “Day Laborers,” and in that noble poem, “Mortis Dignitas,” imbued with reverence and touched with the simplicity of the verities. It must be appraised with the best work of his pen, not only for its theme, but for the direct and unadorned word and measure so integral with the thought: Here lies a common man. His horny hands, Crossed meekly as a maid’s upon his breast, Show marks of toil, and by his general dress You judge him to have been an artisan. Doubtless, could all his life be written out, The story would not thrill nor start a tear; He worked, laughed, loved, and suffered in his time, And now rests peacefully, with upturned face Whose look belies all struggle in the past. A homely tale; yet, trust me, I have seen The greatest of the earth go stately by, While shouting multitudes beset the way, With less of awe. The gap between a king And me, a nameless gazer in the crowd, Seemed not so wide as that which stretches now Betwixt us two, this dead one and myself. Untitled, dumb, and deedless, yet he is Transfigured by a touch from out the skies Until he wears, with all-unconscious grace, The strange and sudden Dignity of Death. This is a fitting transition to _Lyrics of Brotherhood_, which, together with his latest volume, presents the phase of Mr. Burton’s work most representative of his feeling toward life. Any poet worthy of the name will come at last to a vision that only his eyes can see. Life will rise before him in a different semblance from that she presents to another; and if Beauty has lured him on, votary to that he might not wholly see, Life’s yearning face wears no disguise, and, once having looked upon it with seeing eyes, it is an image not to be effaced. There are many who look and never see,—the majority, perhaps. Their eyes are holden by the shapes that cross the inner sight, by hope and memory and their own ideal. They shall see only by one of those “flashes struck from midnight” of a personal tragedy—and often enough we gain our vision thus.