After crossing the railway bridge the road rises sharply for a few yards, and then a whole stretch of undulating woodland is before one:  to the right bosky green, but on the left a rough dark heath with a shaggy wilderness of pine for background, heightened here and there with a sudden surprise of gentle silver birch.  How freshly the wind met one at the top of the road:  a southwest wind soft and blithe enough to have blown through ‘Diana of the Crossways.’

    ’You saucy south wind, setting all the budded beech boughs swinging
    Above the wood anemones that flutter, flushed and white,
    When far across the wide salt waves your quick way you were winging,
    Oh! tell me, tell me, did you pass my sweetheart’s ship last night?

      Ah! let the daisies be,
      South wind! and answer me;
      Did you my sailor see? 
      Wind, whisper very low,
      For none but you must know
      I love my lover so.’

I had been keeping that question to ask it for two or three days, since a good friend had told me of some lyrics by Miss Frances Wynne; and the little volume, charmingly entitled Whisper, was close under my arm as I turned from the road across the heath—­a wild scramble of scrubby chance-children, wind-sown from the pines behind.  And then presently, like a much greater person, ‘I found me in a gloomy wood astray.’

But I soon realised that it wasn’t the day for pinewoods, however rich in associations.  Dark days are their Opportunity.  Then one is in sympathy.  But on days when the sunshine is poured forth like yellow wine, when the broom is ablaze, and the sky blue as particular eyes, the contrast of those dark aisles without one green blade is uncanny.  Its listening loneliness almost frightens one.  Brurrhh!  One must find a greenwood where things are companionable:  birds within call, butterflies in waiting, and a bee now and again to bump one, and be off again with a grumbled ’Beg your pardon.  Confound you!’ So presently imagine me ’prone at the foot of yonder’ sappy chestnut, nice little cushions of moss around me, one for Whisper, one for a pillow; above, a world of luminous green leaves, filtered sunlight lying about in sovereigns and half-sovereigns, and at a distance in the open shine a patch of hyacinths, ’like a little heaven below.’

Whisper!  Tis the sweetest little book of lyrics since Mrs. Dollie Radford’s Light Load.  Whitman, you will remember, always used to take his songs out into the presence of the fields and skies to try them.  A severe test, but a little book may bear it as well as a great one.  The Leaves of Grass claims measurement with oaks; but Whisper I tried by speedwell and cinquefoil, and many other tiny sweet things for which I know no name, by all airs and sounds coming to me through the wood, quaint little notes of hidden birds,—­and the songs were just as much at home there as the rest, because they also had grown out of Nature’s heart, and were as much hers as any leaf or bird.  So I dotted speedwell all amongst them, because I felt they ought to know each other.