seems habitual and familiar to him. We see that in this man
them was the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with
the deep earnestness, the force and passionate ardour of a hero.
Tears lie in him, and consuming fire; as lightning lurks in the
drops of the summer cloud. He has a resonance in his bosom
for every note of human feeling, the high, and the low, the sad,
the ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns to his
'lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit.'"

We should add he was fortunate, poetically, in having the
common speech and the every-day rhythm and idiom
thoroughly at one with him in his song-writing. He was
the last poet of the northern stock in whom the old spirit of
folk-song moved powerfully and congenially as part of his
mother-impulse; and with him closes or pauses the age-long
folk tradition so far as the northern current of lyric poetry
can now be estimated.

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