idson has to speak of whisky
and calls it

amber spirit that enshrines the heart
Of an old Lothian summer,

we have to recognise that he has come very well out of a difficulty. If
at another time he refers to it as

things which journalists require,

we must remember that the context implies a certain humour.

"Clear, but not flat," is an easy maxim to utter, but, as Wordsworth too
often shows, the danger of falling from studied simplicity into bald
prose is always present; and for that reason do smaller artists rather
choose to trick their thoughts in verbal jewellery. We cannot say that
Davidson, who undertakes to run the risk, never makes the fatal step. In
the address to the daisy--

Oh, little brave adventurer!
We human beings love you _so_,

the last word, and indeed the whole line, verges on the infantile. So it
is a shock when, after a passage of some pretensions, we come upon the
lines--

My way of life led me to London town,
And difficulties, which I overcame;

or--

But yet my waking intuition,
That longed to execute its mission.

It is extremely difficult to realise that the same man wrote these sorry
lines who, in another place, adopts this for his style--

... Here spring appears
Caught in a leafless brake, her garland torn,
Breathless with wonder, and the tears half dried
Upon her rosy cheek.

For our comfort and his let us remember that it was the same Wordsworth
who wrote both the _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ and also the
lines--

I've measured it from side to side:
It's three feet long and two feet wide!

Nevertheless flaws of this kind are few, and it is almost unfair for me
to be the means perhaps of conveying even thus much impression of
faultiness about verses which sustain so high a general level of
excellence of language.

In point of melody and harmony and flow of verse there can be no doubt
that our poet is, for instance, an excellent writer of songs, in which a
vigorous simplicity is the prime requisite. They lilt along with great
vivacity and ease. But elsewhere I could wish that here and there he
would amend his rhymes. "Reviewer" and "literature," "pierced" and
"athirst," "noise" and "voice," "inquisition" and "division," "trees"
and "palaces," "shade is" and "ladies," "giftless" and "swiftness," are
far from pleasing; and though I am almost ashamed to play the detective
in work which is mostly full of charm, I find my