e to pick out one as more representative
than another where so many are representative and where all are of
highest achievement. Nowhere is his own individual note better
sustained, however, than in the Michael Robartes poems or in "The Rose
of Battle" or "Into the Twilight"; and the hold that dream has of him
and the hold that human things have, chief among them love of country,
are told with utmost distinction and inevitability of phrase in "To
Ireland in the Coming Times" and in "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time."

I sometimes wonder, is the reason for the poet's holding so devotedly to
spiritual things of his kind not the very same holding of his peasant
countryman to the folk-tales that take him to a world as rich and
gorgeous-hued as the Ireland about him is bare and gray, and to a church
that prepares him for a better world after death? A large part of all
poetry is the realization of the brevity of all beautiful things,--of
bloom, of youth, of life; but no poet has more often lamented "Fate and
Time and Change" than Mr. Yeats. It is, he says, "our narrow rooms, our
short lives, our soon ended passions and emotions put us out of conceit
with sooty and feeble reality." So the poet seeks refuge in his own
dream and in contemplation of the life from which he came and to which
he will return, and--one almost dare say--in communication with which he
now knows such joy. The poet's life is little because he has found out
the littleness of earthly things; the peasant holds life little because
his share of it has been so poor. If the peasant acquires riches by
chance or by emigration, he sees as the poet that all he can have is as
nothing, so short is the time he may hold it. Irish writers of the past
have made this peasant only the jarvey wit; but if you read the old
romances, or listen to the folk-tales still alive, you will learn that
Mr. Yeats is at one with his countryman in this basic likeness.

There is a side of Irish life, the side the world knows best, that Mr.
Yeats does not present, but that which he does present is true, though
the poet's personality is so dominant that we get more of this than of
Ireland in his poetry. So it should be, so it is with every artist. All
the world can ask of him is his interpretation of what he knows. Yet so
native is Mr. Yeats that the atmosphere of his poetry is the very
atmosphere of Ireland. The artist and the setting of his art are in an
unwonted harmony. No reader of Mr.