"Never will a tear or a heart-ache enter
Over that enchanted wall.
"But, O, if you find that castle
Draw back your foot from the gateway,
Let not its peace invite you,
Let not its offerings tempt you.
For faded and decayed like a garment,
Love to a dust will have fallen,
And song and laughter will have gone with sorrow,
And hope will have gone with pain;
And of all the throbbing heart's high courage
Nothing will remain."
But here the expression is simple enough to catch up the reader who does not dwell naturally in these metaphysical regions, and the effect is to prove more certainly than before that Mr. Squire is an original poet with a definite and valid way of looking at life.
With this growth of simplicity he has also extended his power of doing the simple things, of describing natural beauty; and his long poem Rivers, here collected for the first time, is a series of extraordinarily beautiful pictures, seen or imagined:
"Rivers I have seen which were beautiful,
Slow rivers winding in the flat fens,
With bands of reeds like thronged green swords
Guarding the mirrored sky;
And streams down-tumbling from the chalk hills
To valleys of meadows and water-cress beds,
And bridges where, under dark weed-coloured shadows,
Trout flit or lie.
". . . O in reverie I know the Volga
That turns his back upon Europe,
And the two great cities on his banks,
Novgorod and Astrakhan;
Where the world is a few soft colours,
And under the dove-like evening
The boatmen chant ancient songs,
The tenderest known to man.
