for the scent of pine-needles, for a draught of water from a spring that has never been walled in. When this happens we return gladly, in body and in actuality, or in spirit and in poetry, to claim our kinship with the kind Earth and to be soothed by the maternal forces of her life.

Man's intimacy with nature is told in many modern poems. It is even a part of the melody of Robert Frost's lyric, "The Sound of The Trees." The rhythm of moving trees is in the words. It is the very tune of the trees, at once irregular and stately. This is a proof that the poem was profoundly felt before it was written. It could hardly have been made by the self-conscious intellect, the practical intellect that deals competently enough with the surfaces of things. For in the simplest and most impressive language, Mr. Frost reveals the very nature of trees in what he says about himself and reveals his own mood in what he says about the trees. To have written such sincere poetry is to have taken one little step in time to the grand march of the universe. It is to have been a participant in the neverending pageant of the natural world and to have shared the experience of participation with others.

This fact, that the modern poet desires to share an experience in his poetry, is responsible for his way of telling what he knows about the natural world. Although he is both truthful and accurate in his own way, his method is impressionistic rather than photographic. He does not describe in detail. He presents in essence. And he is always personal. His own emotion quickens his readers. It is what makes his poems strong to reach into other people's minds and hearts. We might read two or three pages of good description of a cherry tree, pages composed with pains and aiming to tell just what a cherry tree is like, and yet remain untouched. It is well nigh impossible to read the famous little lyric about the cherry tree, by A. E. Housman, dispassionately. After two or three readings it is well nigh impossible to forget it. That little poem tells us something about the cherry tree that we have felt ourselves. But Mr. Housman has felt it more keenly and expressed it better than we could express it.

"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide."

That is all that is said in description of the cherry tree. The other lines of the poem are lyrical, personal, naïve. The beauty in them can belong to anyone who will take them upon his own lips and into his own mind. It is, moreover, a beauty so simple that it defies analysis. It is difficult for a critic to tell of what elements it is composed.

A similar naïvete is a part of the charming quality of many of William H. Davies' lyrics of nature. Mr. Davies does more than express his own love of the beautiful things out of doors. He is conscious of a reciprocity in friendliness and tells his readers about it. He is "Nature's Friend."

"Say what you like,

All things love me!
Horse, Cow, and Mouse
Bird, Moth and Bee."

He has something of a child's capacity for anticipation. In that lovable lyric, "The Rain," he says,

"I hope the sun shines bright;
"Twill be a lovely sight."

and in "Leisure" he asks innocently,

"What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

"No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep and cows.

The effervescent gayety of many of his short lyrics is like the perennially renewed youth of the out of doors.

The English and the Irish seem to have domesticated nature, if we can judge by much of their poetry about it. Mr. Davies

is only one of many English poets who sing of a nature in which cows and horses and mice have a place, a nature of rosebushes and trimmed hedges. It is the cultivated nature of lanes and gardens that Edward Thomas knows and of which he tells us in a number of delightful, whimsical poems. The following lines are typical of his quiet genius.

"If I should ever by chance grow rich

I'll buy Codham, Cockridden and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,

And let them all to my elder daughter.

The rent I shall ask of her will be only
Each year's first violets, white and lonely,
The first primroses and orchises-

She must find them before I do, that is.”

Padraic Colum, the Irish poet, who has lived for several years in the United States, has written a number of beautiful poems of domesticated nature which he has put into a book called "Wild Earth And Other Poems." The first thought that comes into the mind of an American who turns the pages of it is that Mr. Colum's "wild earth" is not very "wild." In a certain sense, perhaps, the earth is always wild and always will be. But Mr. Colum's poetry is about earth that knows the plough, earth on which homes have been built. The first poem in the book is called "The Plougher," and the second "The Furrow And The Hearth." To the children of pioneers who cut logs in the wilderness and broke the soil of a continent for the first time with the plough, the word "wild" has another meaning.

But Mr. Colum's poetry is beautiful and dignified. It is fraught with racial emotion. It is homely and strong. It is concerned with nature, to be sure, but with nature subdued to meet the needs of man.

"Stride the hill, sower,
Up to the sky-ridge,
Flinging the seed,
Scattering, exultant!

Mouthing great rhythms
To the long sea beats
On the wide shore, behind

The ridge of the hillside."

In sharp contrast with poetry of this kind is such a lyric as "In The Mohave" by Patrick Orr, a poem about the Mohave Desert. Mr. Orr's poem, like the poems of Mr. Housman, Mr. Thomas, and Mr. Colum, is lyrical and impressionistic. It is the sharing of an experience. But because the experience is not gay or gentle, but poignant and cruel, the poem in which it is shared is astringent and of a sharp flavor. It is a poem of wild

nature.

"As I went down the arroyo through yuccas belled with bloom I saw a last year's stalk lift dried hands to the light,

Like age at prayer for death within a careless room,

Like one by day o'er taken whose sick desire is night."

Mr. Orr saw that in the desert. Anyone can see it there. When he apostrophizes the desert, however, he reveals what he himself felt, and gives permanent form to it.

"O cruel land, where form endures, the spirit fled."

The emotional reaction which made it possible for him to utter that line is the suggestive force in each of his lines of description. It is what gives vitality to his portrayal of the brilliance and cruelty of the desert.

A day may come when it will no longer be possible to write poems about wild nature, because nature will no longer be wild anywhere in the world. A day may come when so many people will live in so many places now uninhabited that all of the natural world will be domesticated. Probably poets will never again have a better chance than they have to-day to share their experiences in the wild, open world. Lovers of poetry can not help wishing that the poets may get the best things of the great out of doors made into poetry before they are made into picture postal cards, before the sides of the trails that go to