ve him if he ventures into the vast without a landmark
visible to other eyes than his own. Blake had a supremely great genius
and was saved in part. The masculine vigour of his passion gave
stability to the figures of his imagination. They are heroes because
they are made to speak like heroes. Even in Blake's most recondite work
there is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we recognise
the austere and awful countenances of gods. The phantasmagoria of the
dreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet. Like
Jacob, he wrestled until the going down of the sun with his angel and
would not let him go.

The effort which such momentary victories demand is almost superhuman;
yet to possess the power to exert it is the sole condition upon which a
poet may plunge into the world of phantasms. Mr Yeats has too little of
the power to vindicate himself from the charge of idle dreaming. He
knows the problem; perhaps he has also known the struggle. But the very
terms in which he suggests it to us subtly convey a sense of
impotence:--

Hands, do what you're bid;
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.

The languor and ineffectuality of the image tell us clearly how the poet
has failed in his larger task; its exactness, its precise expression of
an ineffectuality made conscious and condoned, bears equal witness to
the poet's minor probity. He remains an artist by determination, even
though he returns downcast and defeated from the great quest of poetry.
We were inclined at first, seeing those four lines enthroned in majestic
isolation on a page, to find in them evidence of an untoward conceit.
Subsequently they have seemed to reveal a splendid honesty. Although it
has little mysterious and haunting beauty, _The Wild Swans at Coole_ is
indeed a swan song. It is eloquent of final defeat; the following of a
lonely path has ended in the poet's sinking exhausted in a wilderness of
gray. Not even the regret is passionate; it is pitiful.

'I am worn out with dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams;
And all day long I look
Upon this lady's beauty
As though I had found in book
A pictured beauty,
Pleased to have filled the eyes
Or the discerning ears,
Delighted to be but wise,
For men improve with the years;
And yet, and yet
Is this my dream, or the truth?
O would that we had met
When I had my burning y