The Excellent Versatility of the Minor Poet

Petals of wild cherry blossom were flying on a soft rush of wind that swept through the beech wood. Little bright sheathlets lay, brown and shining, at the feet of the smooth silver-green boles of the trees. The leaves, not yet rid of the silky soft fringes of their babyhood, fluttered like little flags, and glowed like green flame; they were not yet thick enough to hide the misty blue sky, laced with feathery cloudlets. Light seemed to flow from the little leaves――the light of life, the life of spring-time. The "Fire of God" was aflame in the wood world; a green mist of colour was aglow in the very air that pulsed between the beech-tree boles. In every dell the bracken sprang up straightly, uncurling its brown heads to spread abroad the branches of its later summer greenery. The first blue-bells were there too, covering the ground with tender blue mist, and filling the air with an ecstasy of perfume that smote the senses with the pain that attends the inexpressible and almost intangible; for the soul of all joy, of all sweetness, whether of perfume, sight, or sound, is ever hidden away in the heart of things, whereof all that can be smelt, or seen, or heard, does but torment us with a deeper, eternally elusive longing.

On a bough a blue tit hung head downwards, and beneath the bough, half hidden in a crisp bed of last year's leaves, lay a child who watched the tit with half-shut eyes, and shook with a delight he did not understand, which was akin to pain. A queer, lonely, shy child, lying in a wood, trembling with a force which was trying to express itself through him. He was the motherless son of an old country vicar, who took scarcely any notice of him until the boy was old enough to read the books his father loved, who let the child "run wild" from sunrise to sunset, and after.