• Most of the poems in In a Green Shade,
by George Montagu, Earl" of Sandwich (Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 5s.), are pleasantly and refreshingly, amidst the cacophonic screechings of numerous very free versifiers, in harmony with the book's quiet if rather hackneyed title. This poet can take the simplest rural theme and, in the original sense of a much insulted word, intellectualize it for a song or a fragment of honest traditional verse=some of which becomes poetry, while the rest remains -verse. His pages have little glitter, but they have authenticity of feeling, and here and there a mellow quality not to be appreciated fully at the first reading. We may quote a stanza or two of " Credo," a poem which is at once a statement of faith and a poetic
index :—
This is my creed—
When life is sweet or gone awry, My song to singing birds may. hie, And swifts careening in the sky, To give the lead.
This is my creed—
To sense the woodlands' magic hour, When oak and ash-tree-draw their power : Or share the secret of a flower Within the seed.
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