nce that he would be accounted

"True brother of that company
That sang to lighten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song,"--

and Nationalist though he still is he has grown more and more
preoccupied with art. There was a time when a love of the occult
threatened his art, but from that the theatre has saved him, if it has
taken him from the writing lyrics, in which his powers are at their
highest. To old Irish legend, Mr. Yeats has, however, been true from the
start, and from the start, too, there has never been a time the two he
has not been preoccupied with dream. And if the two loves to which he
has been constant cannot be said with exactitude to be in the story of
Forgael and Dectora, because that story is not a reshaping of any one
legend out of old Irish legend, it is of the very spirit of the journeys
oversea in which that legend abounds, and it is steeped in dream. It
would be here, then, that one would look for an expression as like a
_credo_ as is possible to Mr. Yeats, and here we do find it on the lips
of Forgael, his hero, who, can we doubt? speaks also for the poet
himself:--

"All would be well
Could we but give us wholly to the dreams,
And get into their world that to the sense
Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly
Among substantial things; for it is dreams
That lift us to the flowing changing world
That the heart longs for. What is love itself,
Even though it be the lightest of light love,
But dreams that hurry from beyond the world,
To make low laughter more than meat and drink,
Though it but set us sighing?"

"On Baile's Strand" (1903) follows very closely the story of Cuchulain's
slaying of his own son as retold Lady Gregory in her "Cuchulain of
Muirthemne" (1902). Like Rustum he does not know who is the youth he is
fighting until he has given him his death wound. Its high tragedy rends
the more by the ironic setting of Blind Man and Fool, two wastrels, one
of whom might have prevented the tragedy, but would not because the
fight would give him and his fellow a chance to rob the larders in
houses whose owners were watching it. No one can doubt the high
intention of "On Baile's Strand," no one can deny that its story is
essentially dramatic, no one can pass by certain passages without
realization that here is great verse, blank verse that is true dramatic
speech. Men remember Cuchulain's description of Aoife as men remember
M