, returns, after three hundred years
of adventure, to find Ireland Christianized. St. Patrick hears him
relate that he had been carried by his immortal wife, Niamh, to the
land of the Ever-Young,--

"Where broken faith has never been known,
And the blushes of first love never have flown,"[2]

that he had battled for a hundred years with an undying foe, and that
his strength had not waned during his stay on those immortal shores,
although he had felt the effect of age when his foot again touched his
native land. The days of "gods and fighting" men are brought back in
this romantic poem. The battles, however, are not such gory conflicts
as Scott and Kipling can paint. Yeats's contemplative genius presents
bloodless battles, symbolic of life's continued fight, and accentuates
the eternal hope and peace in the land of immortal youth.

Among his shorter narrative poems, which show some of the power of
_The Wanderings of Oisin_, are _The Death of Cuchulain_, _The Old Age
of Queen Maeve_, and _Baile and Aillinn_. Baille and Aillinn are the
Irish Romeo and Juliet, each of whom hears from the baleful Aengus the
false report that the other is dead. Each lover unhesitatingly seeks
death in order to meet the other at once beyond these mortal shores.
Yeats has also told simple stories in simple verse, as may be seen in
_The Ballad of Father Gilligan_ or _The Fiddler of Dooney_.

The most striking characteristic of Yeats's work is the pensive
yearning for a spiritual love, for an unchecked joy, and an unchanging
peace beyond what mortal life can give. These qualities are strikingly
illustrated by such poems as _Into the Twilight_, _The Everlasting
Voices_, _The Hosting of the Sidhe_ (Fairies), _The Stolen Child_. The
very spirit of Celtic poetry is seen in these lines from _The Lake
Isle of Innisfree_:--

"And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings."[3]

Yeats's verse has been called "dream-drenched poems." The term is
admirably descriptive of his romantic, lyrical verse.

George W. Russell.--Among the most prominent of these Celtic
imaginative writers is George W. Russell (1867- ), "the Irish
Emerson," popularly known as "A.E." He is a poet, a painter, a mystic,
and a dramatist. With Lady Gregory and Yeats, he has been one of the