That from the tiny bents and misted leaves

Withdraws his timid horn,

And fearful visions weaves.

As we read Clare we discover that it is almost always the little things that catch his eye:

Grasshoppers go in many a thrumming spring,

And now to stalks of tasselled sow-grass cling,
That shakes and swees awhile, but still keeps straight;
While arching ox-eye doubles with his weight.
Next on the cat-tail grass with farther bound
He springs, that bends until they touch the ground.

He is never weary of describing the bees. He praises the ants. Of the birds, he seems to love the small ones best. How beautifully he writes of the hedge-sparrow's little song!:

While in a quiet mood hedge-sparrows try
An inward stir of shadowed melody.

Clare

There is the genius of a lover in this description. Here is something finally said. continually labours to make the report of his eye and ear accurate. He even begins one of his Asylum Poems with the line:

Sweet chestnuts brown like soling leather turn;

and, in another, pursues realism in describing an April evening to the point of writing:

Sheep ointment seems to daub the dead-hued sky.

His attempt at giving an exact echo of the bluetit's song-his very feeble attempt-makes the success of one of his good poems tremble for a moment in the balance:

Dreamers, mark the honey bee;

Mark the tree

Where the blue cap "tootle tee"

Sings a glee,

Sung to Adam and to Eve-
Here they be.

When floods covered every bough,

Noah's ark

Heard that ballad singing now;
Hark, hark.

"Tootle, tootle, tootle tee"

Can it be

Pride and fame must shadows be?
Come and see-

Every season owns her own;

Bird and bee

Sing creation's music on;

Nature's glee

Is in every mood and tone
Eternity.

Clare comes nearer an imaginative vision of life in this than in most of his poems. But, where Shelley would have given us an image, Clare is content to set down "Tootle, tootle, tootle tee."

His poems of human life are of less account than his poems of bird and insect life; but one of the most beautiful of all his poems, "The Dying Child," introduces a human figure among the bees and flowers. How moving are the first three verses!:

He could not die when trees were green,
For he loved the time too well.
His little hands, when flowers were seen,
Were held for the bluebell,

As he was carried o'er the green.

His eye glanced at the white-nosed bee,
He knew those children of the spring:
When he was well and on the lea,

He held one in his hands to sing,

Which filled his heart with glee.

Infants, the children of the spring!

How can an infant die

When butterflies are on the wing,

Green grass, and such a sky?
How can they die at spring?

The writer of these lines was a poet worth rediscovering, and Messrs. Blunden and Porter have given us a book in which we can wander at will, peering into hedges and at the traffic of the grass, as in few even of the great poets. Mr. Blunden has also written an admirable, though

needlessly pugnacious account of the life of The Green Man, as Clare was called in Lamb's circle because of his clothes. It is a story of struggle, poverty, drink, a moment's fame without money to correspond, a long family, and the madness of a man who, escaping from the asylum, ate "the grass on the roadside which seemed to taste something like bread." Knowing the events of his life, we read Clare's poetry with all the more intense curiosity. And, if we do not expect to find a Blake or a Wordsworth, we shall not be disappointed. Certainly this is a book that must go on the shelf near the works of Mr. Hudson.

XII

HISTORIANS AS ENTERTAINERS

Herodotus is one of the oldest illustrations of the fact that a test of good literature is its capacity to entertain us. There are two sorts of writing the entertaining and the dull-and the dull is outside literature. This is a fact which, though it is perfectly obvious, tends to be forgotten by many writers, even by many able writers, in every century. Authors fall in love with their own ponderosity, forgetting that a huge tome is too often a huge tomb. That is the explanation of the long lives and the still longer histories that the publishers and the authors of the nineteenth century loved. Biographies became life-size, and histories rivalled in length the wars they chronicled. A Victorian biographer appeared to think that he was performing more ambitious work in writing a life of Milton in six volumes than if he were to write it in one. Similarly, a historian instead of giving us a Cromwell that the eye could take in as one ab