... My heart!
Who wore it out with sensual drudgery
Before it came to me? What warped its valves?
It has been used; my heart is secondhand.

This is not the time to exhaust the Davidsonian philosophy, if there be
such. We are treating the writer as a poet, and the examples which I
have quoted of his joy in nature and his fellow-feeling with mankind,
should, I think, demonstrate that he has the gifts of vivid seeing, of
vivid feeling, and of vivid expression. If genuine poetry consists of
two essentials, substance and form, we cannot deny the substance in Mr.
Davidson. He has the gift of "high seriousness," which Arnold declares
to be a requisite of all that is classic. He is not always deep; he is
not faultless. The same writer who can condense a thought thus--

On Eden's daisies couched, they felt
They carried Eden in their heart,

is also capable of writing, as poetry, these lines:--

For no man ever understood a woman,
No woman ever understood a man,
And no man ever understood a man:
No woman ever understood a woman,
And no man ever understood himself;
No woman ever understood herself.

We can only surmise that Mr. Davidson had just been reading Whitman, and
was under the temporary hallucination that this poor stuff was profound
thinking. But all poets, nay, all prose-writers, even the greatest,
have their lapses into bathos. Yes, even--and I say it with
trembling--even Shakespeare.

Let us look, now, for a few moments, more closely, in order to
appreciate the particular elements of his genius, as manifested in the
form which is his style.

And first, his language. To be perfect, expression must be luminous yet
terse, vigorous, yet in taste and keeping. It must be without
mannerisms, without inadequacy, without flatness, without obscurity.
"Clear, but with distinction," is the brief definition of Aristotle.
Davidson has learned his lesson well from Shelley and Wordsworth and
Arnold. He cultivates all the virtues, and not without success. He has
not been tempted to leave the true path and court singularity, whether
in the shape of Browning's verbal puzzles or of Swinburne's luscious and
alliterative turgidness. His diction is of the simplest. Says one of his
personae--

I love not brilliance; give me words
Of meadow-growth and garden plot,
Of larks and black-caps; gaudy birds,
Gay flowers and jewels like me not.

It is astonishing how expressive the simple word can