nd-life
so alien in all ways from the life of cities, and, let me add, from
that of the great mass of the nation to which, in the communal
sense, we both belong. But in the Domhan-Toir of friendship there
are resting-places where all barriers of race, training, and
circumstances fall away in dust. At one of these places we met, a
long while ago, and found that we loved the same things, and in the
same way.

The letter ends with this: "There is another Paras (Paradise) than that
seen of Alastair of Innisron--the Tir-Nan-Oigh of friendship. Therein we
both have seen beautiful visions and dreamed dreams. Take, then, out of
my heart, this book of vision and dream."

"Fiona Macleod," then, would appear to be the collective name given to
a sort of collaborative Three-in-One mysteriously working together: an
inspiring Muse with the initials E.W.R.; that psychical "other self"
of whose existence and struggle for expression William Sharp had been
conscious all his life; and William Sharp, general _litterateur_, as
known to his friends and reading public. "Fiona Macleod" would seem to
have always existed as a sort of spiritual prisoner within that comely
and magnetic earthly tenement of clay known as William Sharp, but
whom William Sharp had been powerless to free in words, till, at
the wand-like touch of E.W.R.--the creative stimulus of a profound
imaginative friendship--a new power of expression had been given to
him--a power of expression strangely missing from William Sharp's
previous acknowledged writings.

To speak faithfully, it was the comparative mediocrity, and occasional
even positive badness, of the work done over his own name that formed
one of the stumbling-blocks to the acceptance of the theory that William
Sharp _could_ be "Fiona Macleod." Of course, his work had been that of
an accomplished widely-read man of letters, his life of Heine being
perhaps his most notable achievement in prose; and his verse had not
been without intermittent flashes and felicities, suggestive of
smouldering poetic fires, particularly in his _Sospiri di Roma_; but,
for the most part, it had lacked any personal force or savour, and was
entirely devoid of that magnetism with which William Sharp, the man, was
so generously endowed. In fact, its disappointing inadequacy was a
secret source of distress to the innumerable friends who loved him
with a deep attachment, to which the many letters making one of the
d