(To THE EDITOS OP THE "SPECTATOIL" . 1 SIR,—I read with great
pleasure in my Spectator of June 17th Miss May Doney's little poem, "Incense," and this pleasure was intensified when I came across the following passage in Mr. Eden Phillpotts's novel, "The River," this (Sunday) morning :-
" Now Edgecombe marked the ascending smoke that rose from solitary cots and homesteads in the plain beneath him. As each lifted the incense of a human hearth to the morning he thought of the hands that had lighted it, and the women on their knees by every gathering flame. He knew all of them, for he stood at the centre of his world. The smoke spires rose lazily, and mingling, drifted eastwards before a gentle wind. Their thin, opaline cloud softened the clean glory of the hour. Where cottages clustered the vapour thickened, but upon the wide desolate places, over the river valleys and great peat-beds, it fined to a delicate and sunlit gauze before the wind."
This extract is from chap. 20 (the last) of the book, its title " Ordeal by Faith," and as an example of prose-poetry- the whole chapter, I mean—I think it would be hard to beat, in modern literature at any rate. The sentiment of the selected portion is precisely that of Miss Doney's poem, and I felt charmed beyond words to find it at practically the same moment so beautifully expressed in both prose and verse.—I am, Sir, &c., G. M. P.
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