emotion of his youth, well under control, yet warm with the deepest of Spanish affections, the love of the child ; and that Asturian tenderness—here free from all quaintness and affectation—which delights in meek animals ; his skilful use of old Spanish verse-forms, and even that ethical turn of mind which must arm the poem with a didactical point, yet does it with so light a touch, so elusive a grace, that the poetic value of the whole, far from suffering, is enhanced.

' The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness—this struggle, on the part of souls fittingly constituted—has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic.' This quotation from Edgar Allan Poe appears in English at the head of La Paz del Sendero. It is a significant declaration of principle to which our poet has been loyal with singular consistency. The words of Poe make it clear why Ayala should be above all a poet of intellectual emotion, a poet, that is, who seeks to quicken his own perception of nature while respecting nature's independent existence, refraining, therefore, from colouring her with his own subjective moods and trusting that emotion will rise from the innate harmony between the world and man—man, of course, endowed with the vision and the faculty divine. Shelley was such a poet. But Shelley's way of poetically understanding nature resolved itself into animating the ideas of natural things, giving them a motion, a character, and an expression all their own (or maybe, Shelley's own). Shelley, however, was an English Platonist ; while Ayala is Spanish, that is, he belongs to a race whose natural bent it is to consider man as the centre of things. His way, therefore, of poetically understanding nature consists rather in discovering in nature the human—not man's ephemeral moods and feelings, but the permanently and universally human

which is Man. This obviously leads to the identification of man and nature as two different forms of one and the same life. All is one and the same. This conclusion, the natural outcome of such an attitude of mind, is expressed in the last poem Filosofia, in Ayala's latest volume. It is a poem in which the idea is developed with the skill, finesse, and rhythmical elegance which our poet so easily reaches under his intellectual inspiration.

Whenever the Spanish mind has been free from the overgrowth of dogmatic doctrines—whether religious or philosophical—which often cover its natural form, it has settled down to this attitude, ultimately pantheistic perhaps, but primarily pan-human '. It is the secret of that aesthetic impartiality which is the mark of the old-time Spanish classics, from the epics of Myo Cid to the versified ramblings through experience which we owe to Juan Ruiz of Hita. In Ayala, this feeling of human fellowship is so genuine that he can strike the classical tone without effort by merely letting his creative spirit, moved by true humanism, follow the dictates of an unfailing literary taste. A style results which, in his later works of fiction at least, is perhaps the most truly, most elegantly, yet most freely Spanish style of our generation.

It is a constant feature of Spanish classics that they deal with man pre-eminently as an individual, so that they are often led to situations of a character, conventionally at least if not essentially, anti-social. Adventurers, rogues, prostitutes, often considered in other literatures as merely picturesque material, are, for that deeper and more human reason, favourite subjects of Spanish art. Ayala is no exception to this rule, and disreputable folk occupy a considerable place in his fiction. Even in his early work, he has handled this difficult material, if not always with sure taste,

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