Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/84

Rh what is more obvious, they are picturesque, inventoried stage properties of well-worn appeal. This picturesqueness deludes men after they have despaired of more ideal beauties, such as can only be recognised in particular cases by very rare souls. For Wordsworth, country folk were the matrix out of which an ideal life might yet be moulded; his dearest thoughts and passionate aspirations rejoiced or suffered on their account. Deep country ancientness and Celtic magic had raised Thomas' enthusiasm, but his mind did not unite with what it admired, and gradually felt undeceived, and this disillusionment was closer to reality than his infatuation had been. At a cross-roads he says:

Though doubtless minor disappointments intensified the feeling, in a general sense one would imagine that his birth vexed him because it had not befallen in a pastoral age, in Aready, in Ireland when Cuchulain was about or in the Middle Ages when the oldest of existing barns was building. This soul, we say as we read, must have chafed against modern circumstance. Union with nature, between man and the most essential conditions of his life, such as that supposed to have been achieved in far-off times and places, has a true ideal value; it does correspond to a profound and rational aspiration. Honour then to its at times quaint and perverse expression! But observant eyes see more than they look for. And Thomas, who took pains to visit and know the most untouched parts of England and Wales, and who drank to the dregs the considerable literature which can feed such curiosity, though he still loved nature, was undeceived about man 80