vi PREFACE 



eleven. Blessed, because such multiplication of 

 their influences upon us is something which our 

 present-day life most genuinely needs. 



In our modern world, so hotly busy cooking its 

 feast that it has no time nor heart to sit down 

 to it, we find few moments, few nooks, wherein 

 poetry may take effect on us. We need poetry. 

 We need poetical perception ; not for softness, but 

 for strength. On at least one side of the Atlantic 

 there are readers of English verse, semi-occasional, 

 far-behindhand readers, millions of us, who until 

 lately have left the garden not out of our daily lives 

 alone, but out of our characters. Our souls, like 

 our comfortable houses, go unenclosed from the 

 street, the highway, and are not gardened. There 

 may be some like us across the seas, even in those 

 mother isles where gardening is so beautiful. We 

 need poetry, need to realise it round about us and 

 in us ; need it as practically as the blood needs 

 iron or salt ; and if verse can make the garden 

 garden make the verse more alluring and assimil- 

 able, and if the two, joining their spells, can find 

 us those nooks in time and place wherein the 

 resolution of life's prose into poetry is made easy 

 for beginners or backsliders, then there is an alliance, 

 a reciprocity, an entente worth while worth while ! 

 And such, I am allowed to say, is the purpose of 

 this volume. 



There is no call here for explanatory comments 

 011 what follows ; no need to lay the tip of the 

 pointer upon this or that, or even to say that there 



