nes that flutter, flushed and white,
When far across the wide salt waves your quick way you were winging,
Oh! tell me, tell me, did you pass my sweetheart's ship last night?

Ah! let the daisies be,
South wind! and answer me;
Did you my sailor see?
Wind, whisper very low,
For none but you must know
I love my lover so.'

I had been keeping that question to ask it for two or three days, since a
good friend had told me of some lyrics by Miss Frances Wynne; and the
little volume, charmingly entitled _Whisper_, was close under my arm as I
turned from the road across the heath--a wild scramble of scrubby
chance-children, wind-sown from the pines behind. And then presently, like
a much greater person, 'I found me in a gloomy wood astray.'

But I soon realised that it wasn't the day for pinewoods, however rich in
associations. Dark days are their Opportunity. Then one is in sympathy.
But on days when the sunshine is poured forth like yellow wine, when the
broom is ablaze, and the sky blue as particular eyes, the contrast of
those dark aisles without one green blade is uncanny. Its listening
loneliness almost frightens one. Brurrhh! One must find a greenwood where
things are companionable: birds within call, butterflies in waiting, and a
bee now and again to bump one, and be off again with a grumbled 'Beg your
pardon. Confound you!' So presently imagine me 'prone at the foot of
yonder' sappy chestnut, nice little cushions of moss around me, one for
_Whisper_, one for a pillow; above, a world of luminous green leaves,
filtered sunlight lying about in sovereigns and half-sovereigns, and at a
distance in the open shine a patch of hyacinths, 'like a little heaven
below.'

_Whisper_! Tis the sweetest little book of lyrics since Mrs. Dollie
Radford's _Light Load_. Whitman, you will remember, always used to take
his songs out into the presence of the fields and skies to try them. A
severe test, but a little book may bear it as well as a great one. The
_Leaves of Grass_ claims measurement with oaks; but _Whisper_ I tried by
speedwell and cinquefoil, and many other tiny sweet things for which I
know no name, by all airs and sounds coming to me through the wood, quaint
little notes of hidden birds,--and the songs were just as much at home
there as the rest, because they also had grown out of Nature's heart, and
were as much hers as any leaf or bird. So I dotted speedwell all amongst
them,