terday.

All-natural things! But more--Whence came
This yet remoter mystery?
How do these starry notes proclaim
A graver still divinity?
This hope, this sanctity of fear?
_O innocent throat! O human ear!_

_Fiona Macleod_

(_William Sharp_)

William Sharp was born at Garthland Place, Scotland, in 1855. He wrote
several volumes of biography and criticism, published a book of plays
greatly influenced by Maeterlinck (_Vistas_) and was editor of "The
Canterbury Poets" series.

His feminine _alter ego_, Fiona Macleod, was a far different
personality. Sharp actually believed himself possessed of another
spirit; under the spell of this other self, he wrote several volumes
of Celtic tales, beautiful tragic romances and no little unusual
poetry. Of the prose stories written by Fiona Macleod, the most
barbaric and vivid are those collected in _The Sin-Eater and Other
Tales_; the longer _Pharais, A Romance of the Isles_, is scarcely less
unique.

In the ten years, 1882-1891, William Sharp published four volumes of
rather undistinguished verse. In 1896 _From the Hills of Dream_
appeared over the signature of Fiona Macleod; _The Hour of Beauty_, an
even more distinctive collection, followed shortly. Both poetry and
prose were always the result of two sharply differentiated moods
constantly fluctuating; the emotional mood was that of Fiona Macleod,
the intellectual and, it must be admitted the more arresting, was that
of William Sharp.

He died in 1905.

THE VALLEY OF SILENCE

In the secret Valley of Silence
No breath doth fall;
No wind stirs in the branches;
No bird doth call:
As on a white wall
A breathless lizard is still,
So silence lies on the valley
Breathlessly still.

In the dusk-grown heart of the valley
An altar rises white:
No rapt priest bends in awe
Before its silent light:
But sometimes a flight
Of breathless words of prayer
White-wing'd enclose the altar,
Eddies of prayer.

THE VISION

In a fair place
Of whin and grass,
I heard feet pass
Where no one was.

I saw a face
Bloom like a flower--
Nay, as the rainbow-shower
Of a tempestuous hour.

It was not man, or woman:
It was not human:
But, beautiful and wild,
Terribly undefiled,