to inevitability of phrase, or more fully
diffuse a glamour of otherworldliness. "The Wanderings of Oisin"
revealed poetry as unmistakably new to his day as was Poe's to the
earliest Victorian days. Beside the title poem another from legend had
this new quality, "The Madness of King Goll," with its refrain that
will not out of memory, "They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter
round me, the beech leaves old." "Down by the Salley Gardens" and "The
Meditation of the Old Fisherman" bear witness to talks before turf
fires, or in herring boats off Knocknarea, and other developments of
folk-song or tale have the place-names of his home county of Sligo;
but this distinctive quality is theirs in less measure, and few others
in the little volume have it at all.

In the years just before "The Wanderings of Oisin," Mr. Yeats had been
eager to unite the young writers of Ireland in a movement to give the
country a national literature in English. This project developed side
by side with Dr. Hyde's to give Ireland its own language again and a
modern literature in it. Neither leader was the first to advance
either idea, but each was the first to establish the movement in which
he was most interested; Mr. Yeats's "Wanderings of Oisin" (1889) is
the starting-point of the Celtic Renaissance, and Dr. Hyde's "Leabhar
Sgeuluigheachta" (1889), the starting-point of the Gaelic League,
though this was not organized until 1893. From that day to this these
two men and Mr. George W. Russell ("A.E.") have been the great forces
in the literature of the Renaissance. Mr. Yeats was busy in those
early days with editing fairy and folk-tales and short stories from
the Irish novelists, and in reading these it was but natural that he
should be led to write stories. First came "John Sherman" and "Dhoya"
in 1891, the one a condensed novel with the slightest of plots about a
slow-pulsed young man's troubles with love and laziness in Sligo and
London, and the other a sketch of Irish faery in old time. Some of the
sketches of "The Celtic Twilight" (1893) approach the tale, but such
narrations are not told for their own sake, but as illustrations of
fairy-lore, or they have too little body to win for themselves the
title of tale. In "The Secret Rose" (1897) there are true tales, some
out of Ireland's legendary past, some out of her fairy present, and,
akin to both, the Hanrahan series. These last Mr. Yeats so rewrote in
1904 as to be "nearer to the mind of the co