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Or sometimes this comparison is still more striking, when it is not merely words of the same family, but the very same word which has been twice adopted, at an earlier period and a later the earlier form will be thoroughly English, as 'palsy'; the later will be only a Greek or Latin word spelt with English letters, as 'paralysis. 'Dropsy, 'quinsy, 'megrim, 'squirrel, 'rickets, 'surgeon, 'tansy, 'dittany, 'daffodil, and many more words that one might name, have nothing of strangers or foreigners about them, have made themselves quite at home in English.
And they played it again together, using the gods as pieces, as they had played it oft before. So that those things which have been shall all be again, and under the same bank in the same land a sudden glare of singlight on the same spring day shall bring the same daffodil to bloom once more and the same child shall pick it, and not regretted shall be the billion years that fell between.
This was the case for Michael, though he had been silent at the time about the Inquest, had been unable to resist the temptation to correct Uncle Moses when the old boy asked: "Wot did he say was the blooming name of the party he was after Daverill Daffodil?" His answer was: "No it warn't! Davenant was what he said."
Masefield may be trusted never to disappoint his readers in such fashion. It might be urged that whereas Tennyson gave a picture of man as he ought to be, Mr. Masefield painted him as he really is. But The Daffodil Fields is not melodrama. It is a poem of extraordinary beauty. Every time I read it I see in it some "stray beauty-beam" that I missed before.
Our daffodils are no longer to have the praise of their daring, for we no longer relate them to the lagging swallow. By the time the barely budding woods give a poor man's lodging to the cold daffodil a scanty kind taking the wind with a short stalk and giving it but small petals to buffet we have already said farewell to the tall and splendid green-house daffodil that never braved the cold.
Masefield published The Everlasting Mercy in 1911; The Widow in the Bye Street in 1912; Dauber in 1912; The Daffodil Fields in 1913. We had him classified. He was a writer of sustained narrative, unscrupulous in the use of language, bursting with vitality, sacrificing anything and everything that stood in the way of his effect.
Joost was a sentimentalist, it is true, and the bulb had come from Julia, winged by an appeal from her. But he was also a bulb grower, and he was that before he was anything else and afterwards too, and the daffodil was a marvel of nature, a novelty, a thing beyond words to a connoisseur.
It was one evening on a long flat Dutch road the evening he had tied Julia's shoe. She had spoken of it, she had begun to say, when he stopped the confession that he thought she would afterwards regret, that she could not take the blue daffodil. "What is the name?" he asked; he meant of the grower in Norfolk, though he would have been puzzled to say why he asked.
The last phase in the sunset is a change to blue-grey monochrome, faintly silvered with starlight; hills, Tiber, fields and woods, all floating in aërial twilight. There is no definition of outline now. The daffodil of the horizon has faded into scarcely perceptible pale greenish yellow. We have passed Stimigliano.
"Yes," he replied, in a calm and earnest voice, "and, God willing, we shall accomplish it." A pale light now overspread the eastern sky, which increased, as we ascended, to a daffodil tinge; this afterward heightened to orange, deepening at one extremity into red, and fading at the other into a pure, ethereal hue to which it would be difficult to assign a special name.
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