massive creations. Had he lived Ledwidge might very well have shown more constructive power than I seem to allow. He was still quite young when he was killed in Flanders; and those finer things that his genius would have created when it was fully organised were lost for ever. The choice and subtle images which crown his perceptions so frequently are in themselves structures, just as the cells of the body are living organisms. As we have seen, Sorley stands quite alone in power to shape an inevitable whole at so early an age. The vision that rises for me as I read these Songs of the Fields is more like John Clare than it would be were my mind more capable of detecting the intimate difference of tissue in the liveliest productions of the two men. Still, though in him it were but a phase to outgrow, this temperament embodies before my eyes, as an inveterate way of life in which most poets have some share. Though the body it informs grow old, this does not age: young-eyed, it has wandered every land where an oral literature was cherished, a welcome figure with the pathetic refinement of one who has mused much and yet lives destitute of creature comforts. His clothes have been new in regions far apart, though wear and weather have made them merely his, well-nigh obliterating fashions and colour. Watch, he stops on the hill road before a little fountain's trough which some herd-boy has banked round with turfs and stones, that a few sheep or a cow may drink the better! He discerns in it more success than his own activity has compassed—an image of hopes he once owned. He kneels and, gazing into the limpid basin, sees not, like Narcissus, his own features, but most dear memories, moonrises and sunsets, wind-bent boughs, the calls of many birds, nodding flowers, children running, laughing and kissing—he sees and hears as he first saw and heard. From many poems the delight of other men's visions changes and interchanges with these until he clears a mist from his eyes, for
