ch is bare in Burton Glen
And Bury Hill is a whitening, then
I drink strong ale with gentlemen;
Which nobody can deny, deny,
Deny, deny, deny, deny,
Which nobody can deny."

We must speak here, however, since our space is limited, not of these
sporadic and inessential excellences, but of the isolated and admirable
accidents--for so they seem--which make Mr. Belloc truly a poet.

One of these is the well-known, anthologized _The South Country_;
another is a passage in the mainly humorous poem called _Dedicatory Ode_
which we have quoted in another connexion; two occur in _The Four Men_.
All of them deal with places and country, they are all by way of being
melancholy and express the quite human sadness that goes normally with
the joy in friends and in one's own home.

Such a verse as this in praise of Sussex is inspired, sad and gracious:

"But the men that live in the South Country
Are the kindest and most wise.
They get their laughter from the loud surf,
And the faith in their happy eyes
Comes surely from our Sister the Spring
When over the sea she flies;
The violets suddenly bloom at her feet,
She blesses us with surprise."

The rhythm, apparently wavering, but in reality very exact, alone
reflects in this stanza the sadness which elsewhere in the poem is put
more directly. It is a delicate, ingenuous rhythm, suited most admirably
to (or rather, perhaps, dictating) the unstrained and easy words.

The same mood, the same rhythm, are repeated in a poem in _The Four
Men_:

"The trees that grow in my own country
Are the beech-tree and the yew;
Many stand together,
And some stand few.
In the month of May in my own country
All the woods are new."

But the summit of these poems is reached in another composition in the
same book. He has set it cunningly in a description of the way in which
it was written, so as to be able to strew the approaches to it with
single lines and fragments which he could not use, but which were too
good to be lost. The poem itself runs like this:

"He does not die that can bequeath
Some influence to the land he knows,
Or dares, persistent, interwreath
Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;
He does not die but still remains
Substantiate with his darling plains.

The spring's superb adventure calls
His dust athwart the woods to flame;