ve furrows with a tree-knee through primordial mould; and
it carries us in imagination back to the man of the Stone Age by way of
many other ploughmen, by way of the last man we saw between
plough-handles who appealed to our imagination, a man limned against an
April sky from which the sun had passed to leave all the west that
gold-green that the greatest of Westmoreland dalesmen loved; by way of
that Dumfries peasant whose

"conquering share
Upturned the fallow fields of truth anew";

by way of Wayland Smith, whose anvils dot the shores of Britain; by way
of Tubal Cain, "an artificer in brass and iron," of the seed of Cain, "a
tiller of the ground."

[Illustration]

One wonders is it not of himself that the poet writes, though what he
writes takes us far from him, carrying us in thought halfway round the
world and back through civilizations that have passed. But whether it is
of himself that Mr. Colum writes or not, he is certainly, in a sense,
"The dawn-man ... in the sunset." The "Glory of the Gael" that is
to-day, if it is "glory," is glory of sunset, of "purples and splendors"
that pass; there are those who hold that the race that "went forth to
battle," but "always fell," is already passed beyond the sunset, into
the twilight, that twilight that is the time of day so surely symbolical
of the writing of the many Irish poets that have followed after Mr.
Yeats. Mr. Colum, however, whether his race be in twilight or sunset, is
of the dawn. He is of the dawn not only because he is the youth, at
oldest the young man, in his writing, who sees the world freshly and
fresh, none the less fresh because he knows it old; but he is of the
dawn because it is chiefly those things that are fundamentals, that come
out of the beginnings of things, that interest him profoundly, that stir
him deeply. Subtleties and complexities, decadent things, are not for
him, but simplicities, primordial things, the love of wandering, and
what is only less old, the love of land; and love of woman. These three
things, and youth, and little else, concern him. Mr. Colum writes,
indeed, in the dedication to "Thomas Muskerry" (1910) that he has set
down "three characters that stood as first types in my human comedy, the
peasant, the artist, the official, Murtagh Cosgar, Conn Hourican,
Thomas Muskerry." It is not, however, the official that Mr. Colum
emphasizes in "Thomas Muskerry," but the man who longs for a quiet
little