ces
which sang at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural
than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and
through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and
could pass, almost without changing, into song. The snow lies thick now
upon Olympus, and its scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we
fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in
the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the
vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or
think we desire, for our own. Our historical sense is at fault. Every
century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the
work that seems to us the most natural and simple product of its time is
probably the result of the most deliberate and self-conscious effort. For
Nature is always behind the age. It takes a great artist to be
thoroughly modern.

Let us turn to the poems, which have really only the preface to blame for
their somewhat late appearance. The best is undoubtedly The Weird of
Michael Scott, and these stanzas are a fair example of its power:

Then Michael Scott laughed long and loud:
'Whan shone the mune ahint yon cloud
I speered the towers that saw my birth--
Lang, lang, sall wait my cauld grey shroud,
Lang cauld and weet my bed o' earth!'

But as by Stair he rode full speed
His horse began to pant and bleed;
'Win hame, win hame, my bonnie mare,
Win hame if thou wouldst rest and feed,
Win hame, we're nigh the House of Stair!'

But, with a shrill heart-bursten yell
The white horse stumbled, plunged, and fell,
And loud a summoning voice arose,
'Is't White-Horse Death that rides frae Hell,
Or Michael Scott that hereby goes?'

'Ah, Laird of Stair, I ken ye weel!
Avaunt, or I your saul sall steal,
An' send ye howling through the wood
A wild man-wolf--aye, ye maun reel
An' cry upon your Holy Rood!'

There is a good deal of vigour, no doubt, in these lines; but one cannot
help asking whether this is to be the common tongue of the future
Renaissance of Romance. Are we all to talk Scotch, and to speak of the
moon as the 'mune,' and the soul as the 'saul'? I hope not. And yet if
this Renaissance is to be a vital, living thing, it must have its
linguistic side. Just as the spiritual development of music, and the
artistic dev