precision, his clear vision and the neatness of his expression. These qualities appear at their best when Ayala describes those fugitive movements of nature which are so tempting a material for the artist :

. . . el cielo que en dedos de diamante

hila sutiles hilos de lluvia en sus mil ruecas. . . .1 Sobre el lago del cielo arrojaron la luna y su claror plateado difundiendo va una melodia de halos, que son como aureolas crecientes, en un ritmo ondulante de olas.2

These are good beginnings for a poet. But still better is the strength which can rise to the beautiful simplicity of

Divino peregrino,

mi pensamiento sigue ese blanco camino.3

Mi pensamiento.' Observe the word. Poetry, said Wordsworth, is an overflow of emotion with an undercurrent of thought. Ayala's poetry would be more accurately described as a flow of thought with an undercurrent of emotion, and, though in his early work there is a youthful generosity of feeling which the more mature poet will carefully restrain, it is already possible to detect in it both the strength and the weakness inherent in such an inverted kind of poetry. To his earnest nature Ayala owes his freedom from rhetoric. Coming after the period when Spanish poets seemed to be taking refuge in a rhetoric of passion from the merely verbal rhetoric of their predecessors, Ayala's subdued emotions and penetrating ideas,

1 . . . the sky with diamond fingers

Spins subtle threads of rain on a thousand wheels.. . .

2 On the lake of the sky the moon was thrown

And its silvery gleam diffuses on its way

A melody of halos like aureolas growing

Ever wider with the undulating rhythm of waves.

3   A divine pilgrim,

My thought walks on this white road.

appearing in a closely fitting verbal garment, gracefully but sparingly decorated, brought to Spanish poetry precisely that kind of progress which was to be expected from the well-balanced genius of Asturias. His main weakness lies perhaps in a tendency to sink into mere criticism. True poetry can only be written when emotion is duly ballasted with thought, but too much thought, or too little emotion, may prevent the soaring of poetry. The critic in Ayala often pulls down the poet. His poetry then falls into the anecdotical, the didactical, or merely the jocular. This feature, curiously enough, is not so prominent in his early as in his later work.

Not that Ayala's powers as a poet are diminished by time. Far from it. El Sendero Innumerable, which follows La Paz del Sendero after an interval of twelve years, abounds in excellent verse, and contains perhaps two or three pages of the best contemporary Spanish poetry. Nothing so satisfactorily complete, so deeply philosophical, and so truly poetical as the pages in which Ayala has interpreted the many souls and the one soul of the sea—a symbol of the many souls and the one soul of man and the world—nothing so earnest and so beautiful, so ample, and so minutely exact, has probably been written in modern Spanish verse. In these pages, Ayala finds his true self as the poet of intellectual emotion. The sea, with its unity and its variety, seems to inspire this, his highest poetical mood, with particular felicity. For it is again in a sea-poem that he reaches his best in his third volume, El Sendero Andante. Only here, in El Nino en la Playa, Ayala is even more completely himself. For, along with that wealth of philosophical meaning which makes him look at nature with eyes full of the spirit of man ; along with his genius for the rhythmical interpretation of natural movements and his sensibility to colours, scents, sounds, and tastes, we find again the generous