“You can have a copy, of course,” he exclaimed.  “Put it in your pocket and keep it.”  When I asked him if he had any right to give one away he laughed and said that if any one had thought the whole parcel worth twopence it would not have been left behind.  He was quite right; a cracked dinner —­plate or a saucepan with a hole in it or an earthenware teapot with a broken spout would not have been left, but the line was drawn at a book of sonnets by the late squire.  Nobody wanted it, and so without more qualms I put it in my pocket, and have it before me now, opened at page 63, on which appears, without a headline, the sonnet I first read, and which I quote:—­

   How beautiful are birds, of God’s sweet air
     Free denizens; no ugly earthly spot
     Their boundless happiness doth seem to blot. 
   The swallow, swiftly flying here and there,
   Can it be true that dreary household care
     Doth goad her to incessant flight? 
     If not How can it be that she doth cast her lot
   Now there, now here, pursuing summer everywhere? 
     I sadly fear that shallow, tiny brain
   Is not exempt from anxious cares and fears,
     That mingled heritage of joy and pain
   That for some reason everywhere appears;
     And yet those birds, how beautiful they are! 
     Sure beauty is to happiness no bar.

This has a fault that doth offend the reader of modern verse, and there are many of the eighty sonnets in the book which do not equal it in merit.  He was manifestly an amateur; he sometimes writes with labour, and he not infrequently ends with the unpardonable weak line.  Nevertheless he had rightly chosen this difficult form in which to express his inner self.  It suited his grave, concentrated thought, and each little imperfect poem of fourteen lines gives us a glimpse into a wise, beneficent mind.  He had fought his fight and suffered defeat, and had then withdrawn himself silently from the field to die.  But if he had been embittered he could have relieved himself in this little book.  There is no trace of such a feeling.  He only asks, in one sonnet, where can a balm be found for the heart fretted and torn with eternal cares; when we have thought and striven for some great and good purpose, when all our striving has ended in disaster?  His plan, he concludes, is to go out in the quiet night-time and look at the stars.

Here let me quote two more sonnets written in contemplative mood, just to give the reader a fuller idea not of the verse, as verse, but of the spirit in the old squire.  There is no title to these two:—­

   I like a fire of wood; there is a kind
     Of artless poetry in all its ways: 
     When first ’tis lighted, how it roars and plays,
   And sways to every breath its flames, refined
   By fancy to some shape by life confined. 
     And then how touching are its latter days;
     When, all its strength