Page:Letters from America, Brooke, 1916.djvu/216

166 Lies a pool, rich with murmur and scent and glimmer,

And there my friends go all the radiant day,

Each golden-limbed and flower-crowned laughing swimmer,"

—and so on. It tells how ugly and joyless by comparison the fellow's own country sometimes seems, filled with money-making and fogs and such grey things:

So it goes, with a jolly return on the rhyme. But the whole poem is a bad one. Still, the man felt it, the magic. It is a magic of a different way of life. In the South Seas, if you live the South Sea life, the intellect soon lapses into quiescence. The body becomes more active, the senses and perceptions more lordly and acute. It is a life of swimming and climbing and resting after exertion. The skin seems to grow more sensitive to light and air, and the feel of water and the earth and leaves. Hour after hour one may float in the warm lagoons, conscious, in the whole body, of every shred and current of the multitudinous water, or diving under in a vain attempt to catch the radiant butterfly-coloured fish that flit in and out of the thousand windows