s delightful. There is no garden so well tilled but it can
bear another blossom, and though the subject-matter of Miss Nesbit's book
is as the subject-matter of almost all books of poetry, she can certainly
lend a new grace and a subtle sweetness to almost everything on which she
writes.

The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems is from the clever pen of Mr. W.
B. Yeats, whose charming anthology of Irish fairy-tales I had occasion to
notice in a recent number of the Woman's World. {437} It is, I believe,
the first volume of poems that Mr. Yeats has published, and it is
certainly full of promise. It must be admitted that many of the poems
are too fragmentary, too incomplete. They read like stray scenes out of
unfinished plays, like things only half remembered, or, at best, but
dimly seen. But the architectonic power of construction, the power to
build up and make perfect a harmonious whole, is nearly always the
latest, as it certainly is the highest, development of the artistic
temperament. It is somewhat unfair to expect it in early work. One
quality Mr. Yeats has in a marked degree, a quality that is not common in
the work of our minor poets, and is therefore all the more welcome to
us--I mean the romantic temper. He is essentially Celtic, and his verse,
at its best, is Celtic also. Strongly influenced by Keats, he seems to
study how to 'load every rift with ore,' yet is more fascinated by the
beauty of words than by the beauty of metrical music. The spirit that
dominates the whole book is perhaps more valuable than any individual
poem or particular passage, but this from The Wanderings of Oisin is
worth quoting. It describes the ride to the Island of Forgetfulness:

And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow light,
For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world
and the sun,
Ceased on our hands and faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was
one;

Till the horse gave a whinny; for cumbrous with stems of the hazel and
oak,
Of hollies, and hazels, and oak-trees, a valley was sloping away
From his hoofs in the heavy grasses, with monstrous slumbering folk,
Their mighty and naked and gleaming bodies heaped loose where they
lay.

More comely than man may make them, inlaid with silver and gold,
Were arrow and shield and war-axe, arrow and spear and blade,