no real injury. They were simply the things people said. She felt, guiltily, that she must trick out her teaching with these gauds: she was afraid that what she had to offer was not enough. What she had to offer was simply a feeling that was so profoundly right, so unerring, that she could no more utter great verse meanly than mean verse well. She was a voice that God seeks. She was the reed of demonic ecstasy. She was possessed, she knew not how, but she knew the moment of her possession. The singing tongues of all the world were wakened into life again under the incantation of her voice. She was inhabited. She was spent.
She passed through their barred and bolted boy-life with the direct stride of a spirit. She opened their hearts as if they had been lockets. They said: “Mrs. Leonard is sure a nice lady.”
He knew some of Ben Jonson’s poems, including the fine Hymn to Diana, “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,” and the great tribute to Shakespeare which lifted his hair at
"… But call forth thundering Æschylus, Euripides and Sophocles to us."—
and caught at his throat at:
"He was not for an age, but for all time! And all the Muses still were in their prime…"
The elegy to little Salathiel Pavy, the child actor, was honey from the lion’s mouth. But it was too long.
Of Herrick, sealed of the tribe of Ben, he knew much more. The poetry sang itself. It was, he thought later, the most perfect and unfailing lyrical voice in the language—a clean, sweet, small, unfaltering note. It is done with the incomparable ease of an inspired child. The young men and women of our century have tried to recapture it, as they have tried to recapture Blake and, a little more successfully, Donne.
Here a little child I stand Heaving up my either hand; Cold as paddocks though they be,
