drove the boys and women off.

The place was empty now of people;
A cock came by upon his toes;
An old horse looked across the fence,
And rubbed along the rail his nose.

The maker of the stars and worlds
To His own house did Him betake,
And on that city dropped a tear,
And now that city is a lake.

Mr. Yeats has a great deal of invention, and some of the poems in his
book, such as _Mosada_, _Jealousy_, and _The Island of Statues_, are very
finely conceived. It is impossible to doubt, after reading his present
volume, that he will some day give us work of high import. Up to this he
has been merely trying the strings of his instrument, running over the
keys.

_The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems_. By W. B. Yeats. (Kegan
Paul.)

MR. YEATS'S _WANDERINGS OF OISIN_
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, July 12, 1889.)

Books of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are
never met. Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so
far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating
temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author. Such
a book Mr. Yeats's _Wanderings of Oisin_ certainly is. Here we find
nobility of treatment and nobility of subject-matter, delicacy of poetic
instinct and richness of imaginative resource. Unequal and uneven much
of the work must be admitted to be. Mr. Yeats does not try to 'out-baby'
Wordsworth, we are glad to say; but he occasionally succeeds in
'out-glittering' Keats, and, here and there, in his book we come across
strange crudities and irritating conceits. But when he is at his best he
is very good. If he has not the grand simplicity of epic treatment, he
has at least something of the largeness of vision that belongs to the
epical temper. He does not rob of their stature the great heroes of
Celtic mythology. He is very naive and very primitive and speaks of his
giants with the air of a child. Here is a characteristic passage from
the account of Oisin's return from the Island of Forgetfulness:

And I rode by the plains of the sea's edge, where all is barren and
grey,
Grey sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping
trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the
seas.

Long fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the va