were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and could pass, almost without changing, into song.  The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the vale.  But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own.  Our historical sense is at fault.  Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us the most natural and simple product of its time is probably the result of the most deliberate and self-conscious effort.  For Nature is always behind the age.  It takes a great artist to be thoroughly modern.

Let us turn to the poems, which have really only the preface to blame for their somewhat late appearance.  The best is undoubtedly The Weird of Michael Scott, and these stanzas are a fair example of its power: 

   Then Michael Scott laughed long and loud: 
   ’Whan shone the mune ahint yon cloud
      I speered the towers that saw my birth—­
   Lang, lang, sall wait my cauld grey shroud,
      Lang cauld and weet my bed o’ earth!’

   But as by Stair he rode full speed
   His horse began to pant and bleed;
      ’Win hame, win hame, my bonnie mare,
   Win hame if thou wouldst rest and feed,
      Win hame, we’re nigh the House of Stair!’

   But, with a shrill heart-bursten yell
   The white horse stumbled, plunged, and fell,
      And loud a summoning voice arose,
   ’Is’t White-Horse Death that rides frae Hell,
      Or Michael Scott that hereby goes?’

   ’Ah, Laird of Stair, I ken ye weel! 
   Avaunt, or I your saul sall steal,
      An’ send ye howling through the wood
   A wild man-wolf—­aye, ye maun reel
      An’ cry upon your Holy Rood!’

There is a good deal of vigour, no doubt, in these lines; but one cannot help asking whether this is to be the common tongue of the future Renaissance of Romance.  Are we all to talk Scotch, and to speak of the moon as the ‘mune,’ and the soul as the ‘saul’?  I hope not.  And yet if this Renaissance is to be a vital, living thing, it must have its linguistic side.  Just as the spiritual development of music, and the artistic development of painting, have always been accompanied, if not occasioned, by the discovery of some new instrument or some fresh medium, so, in the case of any important literary movement, half of its strength resides in its language.  If it does not bring with it a rich and novel mode of expression, it is doomed either to sterility or to imitation.  Dialect, archaisms and the like, will not do.  Take, for instance, another poem of Mr. Sharp’s, a poem which he calls The Deith-Tide: