er the reconciliations suggested, and has
set its heart on more fundamental changes, and these essays have only
interest as marking a moment of transition in national life before it
took a new road leading to another destiny.

CONTENTS

NATIONALITY OR COSMOPOLITANISM
STANDISH O'GRADY
THE DRAMATIC TREATMENT OF LEGEND
THE CHARACTER OF HEROIC LITERATURE
A POET OF SHADOWS
THE BOYHOOD OF A POET
THE POETRY OF JAMES STEPHENS
A NOTE ON SEUMAS O'SULLIVAN
ART AND LITERATURE
AN ARTIST OF GARLIC IRELAND
TWO IRISH ARTISTS
"ULSTER"
IDEALS OF THE NEW RURAL SOCIETY
THOUGHTS FOR A CONVENTION
THE NEW NATION
THE SPIRITUAL CONFLICT
ON AN IRISH HILL
RELIGION AND LOVE
THE RENEWAL OF YOUTH
THE HERO IN MAN
THE MEDITATION OF ANANDA
THE MIDNIGHT BLOSSOM
THE CHILDHOOD OF APOLLO
THE MASK OF APOLLO
The CAVE OF LILITH
THE STORY OF A STAR
THE DREAM OF ANGUS OGE
DEIRDRE

NATIONALITY OR COSMOPOLITANISM

As one of those who believe that the literature of a country is for
ever creating a new soul among its people, I do not like to think that
literature with us must follow an inexorable law of sequence, and gain a
spiritual character only after the bodily passions have grown weary and
exhausted themselves. In the essay called The Autumn of the Body, Mr.
Yeats seems to indicate such a sequence. Yet, whether the art of any
of the writers of the decadence does really express spiritual things is
open to doubt. The mood in which their work is conceived, a distempered
emotion, through which no new joy quivers, seems too often to tell
rather of exhausted vitality than of the ecstasy of a new life. However
much, too, their art refines itself, choosing, ever rarer and more
exquisite forms of expression, underneath it all an intuition seems to
disclose only the old wolfish lust, hiding itself beneath the golden
fleece of the spirit. It is not the spirit breaking through corruption,
but the life of the senses longing to shine with the light which makes
saintly things beautiful: and it would put on the jeweled raiment of
seraphim, retaining still a heart of clay smitten through and through
with the unappeasable desire of the flesh: so Rossetti's women, who have
around them all the circumstance of poetry and romantic beauty, seem
through their sucked-in lips to express a thirst which could be allaye