et
By our singing. Let us sing,
Breathing softly, fairily,
Swelling sweetly, airily,
Till earth and sky our echo ring.
Rustling leaves chime with our song:
Fairy bells its close prolong
Ding-dong, ding-dong."

--Or the closely-packed wit in such passages as these--

_Brown_: "This world,
This oyster with its valves of toil and play,
Would round his corners for its own good ease,
And make a pearl of him if he'd plunge in.
* * * * *
_Jones_: And in this matter we may all be pearls.

_Smith_: Be worldlings, truly. I would rather be
A shred of glass that sparkles in the sun,
And keeps a lowly rainbow of its own,
Than one of these so trim and patent pearls
With hearts of sand veneered, sewed up and down
The stiff brocade society affects."

I have opened the book at random for these quotations. Its pages are
stuffed with scores as good. Nor will any but the least intelligent
reviewer upbraid Mr. Davidson for deriving so much of his inspiration
directly from Shakespeare. Mr. Davidson is still a young man; but the
first of these plays, _An Unhistorical Pastoral_, was first printed so
long ago as 1877; and the last, _Scaramouch in Naxos; a Pantomime_, in
1888. They are the work therefore of a very young man, who must use
models while feeling his way to a style and method of his own.

Lack of "Architectonic" Quality.

But--there is a "but"; and I am coming at length to my difficulty with
Mr. Davidson's work. Oddly enough, this difficulty may be referred to
the circumstance that Mr. Davidson's poetry touches Shakespeare's
great circle at a second point. Wordsworth, it will be remembered,
once said that Shakespeare _could_ not have written an Epic
(Wordsworth, by the way, was rather fond of pointing out the things
that Shakespeare could not have done). "Shakespeare _could_ not have
written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought."
Substitute "wit" for "thought," and you have my difficulty with Mr.
Davidson. It is given to few men to have great wit: it is given to
fewer to carry a great wit lightly. In Mr. Davidson's case it
luxuriates over the page and seems persistently to choke his sense of
form. One image suggests another, one phrase springs under the very
shadow