eresting, not so much
for its putting of the relations of Body, Will, and Spirit to one
another in life and at death, as for its beautiful writing, and for its
definite betrayal, when its author is writing most intimately, of a
man's attitude, though he published the story as the work of "Fiona
Macleod." These "spiritual tales" do not belong, all of them, to his
"Fiona Macleod" period, for "Vistas" (1894) contains many of them,
though they are cast here in dialogue form, and there are others among
the work published under his own name. In fact, the writing under the
two names never becomes liker in quality and intention than when it is
"spiritual." The sketch from Part II of "The Dominion of Dreams" (1899),
entitled "The Book of the Opal," for instance, is written on the very
key of "Fragments of the Lost Journals of Piero di Cosimo" (1896), far
apart their subject material, and "The Hill-Wind" by "W.S." dedicated
as it is to "F.M.," might well be a rejected passage from "The Mountain
Lovers." There is the color of the Highlands and Islands about many of
these mystical stories, about "The Hill-Wind," by "W.S." and "The Wind,
the Shadow, and the Soul," the epilogue "F.M." wrote to the "Dominion of
Dreams"; but most of these shorter mystical tales have not the tang and
savor of farm-home on lonely moors, or fisher's hut on the lonelier
machar, that is characteristic of most of the tales long and short, that
deal with modern days.

Nor are the meanings of these "spiritual tales" consistently indicated
in symbols taken from Scottish life, nor is their supernaturalism native
to it. Mrs. Spoer (Ada Goodrich-Freer), in her "Outer Isles" (1902),
tells us "The Celtic Gloom" amuses the Hebridean. If so, what effect
would such discussion as that of "The Lynn of Dreams" and "Maya" have
upon him? But if such essays are not written out of Highland life, they
are none the less interesting, and in the case of "Maya," with its
consideration of waking dream, beautiful as art, and valuable, too, as a
contribution to science.

So far does Sharp go in his belief as to the apprehension of thought
through powers other than those of the senses, that in "The Winged
Destiny" he can look forward to a time "when the imagination shall lay
aside words and pigments and clay, as raiment needless during the
festivals of the spirit, and express itself in the thoughts which
inhabit words--as light inhabits water or as greenness inhabits grass."
Not onl