hrough and through
with the sad little beauties of the world. You will want to put out a
bowl of fresh milk on the doorstep to appease the banshee--did you not
know that the janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the
morning.

One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular charm is his utter
simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that intrigues the
memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever after. Who can
read "Off the Ground" and not strum the dainty jig over and over in his
head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he shaves, whenever the moon is
young? I challenge you to resist the jolly madness of its infection:

Three jolly Farmers
Once bet a pound
Each dance the others would
Off the ground.
Out of their coats
They slipped right soon,
And neat and nicesome,
Put each his shoon.
One--Two--Three--
And away they go,
Not too fast,
And not too slow;
Out from the elm-tree's
Noonday shadow,
Into the sun
And across the meadow.
Past the schoolroom,
With knees well bent
Fingers a-flicking,
They dancing went....

Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade?

The sensible map's quarrel with the proponents of free verse is not that
they write such good prose; not that they espouse the natural rhythms of
the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to the best,
even if as old as Solomon. It is that they affect to disdain the
superlative harmonies of artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not
a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know
nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads. The
haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of
superlative tenderness and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of
iambus and trochee is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly
tripping dactyls. Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the
meed of the trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his
voice before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody. Imagist
journals please copy.

One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the gist of
this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm. There is something fey about much
of the book: it peers behind the curtains of twilight and sees strange
things. In its love of children, its inspired simplicity, its sparkle of
whim and AEsopian brevity, I kn