“Weave the dance and sing the song;
Subterranean depths prolong
The rainy patter of our feet;
Heights of air are rendered sweet
By our singing.  Let us sing,
Breathing softly, fairily,
Swelling sweetly, airily,
Till earth and sky our echo ring. 
Rustling leaves chime with our song: 
Fairy bells its close prolong
Ding-dong, ding-dong.”

—­Or the closely-packed wit in such passages as these—­

Brown:  “This world,
This oyster with its valves of toil and play,
Would round his corners for its own good ease,
And make a pearl of him if he’d plunge in.
* * * * *
Jones:  And in this matter we may all be pearls.

Smith:  Be worldlings, truly.  I would rather be
A shred of glass that sparkles in the sun,
And keeps a lowly rainbow of its own,
Than one of these so trim and patent pearls
With hearts of sand veneered, sewed up and down
The stiff brocade society affects.”

I have opened the book at random for these quotations.  Its pages are stuffed with scores as good.  Nor will any but the least intelligent reviewer upbraid Mr. Davidson for deriving so much of his inspiration directly from Shakespeare.  Mr. Davidson is still a young man; but the first of these plays, An Unhistorical Pastoral, was first printed so long ago as 1877; and the last, Scaramouch in Naxos; a Pantomime, in 1888.  They are the work therefore of a very young man, who must use models while feeling his way to a style and method of his own.

Lack of “Architectonic” Quality.

But—­there is a “but”; and I am coming at length to my difficulty with Mr. Davidson’s work.  Oddly enough, this difficulty may be referred to the circumstance that Mr. Davidson’s poetry touches Shakespeare’s great circle at a second point.  Wordsworth, it will be remembered, once said that Shakespeare could not have written an Epic (Wordsworth, by the way, was rather fond of pointing out the things that Shakespeare could not have done).  “Shakespeare could not have written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought.”  Substitute “wit” for “thought,” and you have my difficulty with Mr. Davidson.  It is given to few men to have great wit:  it is given to fewer to carry a great wit lightly.  In Mr. Davidson’s case it luxuriates over the page and seems persistently to choke his sense of form.  One image suggests another, one phrase springs under the very shadow of another until the fabric of his poem is completely hidden beneath luxuriant flowers of speech.  Either they hide it from the author himself; or, conscious of his lack of architectonic skill, he deliberately trails these creepers over his ill-constructed walls.  I think the former is the true explanation, but am not sure.