e streets of Dublin I walked
with Yeats over thirty years ago. I mix with the people who then were
living in the city, O'Leary, Taylor, Dowden, Hughes and the rest; but
the poet himself does not walk with me. It is a new voice speaking of
the past of others, pointing out the doorways entered by dead youth. The
new voice has distinction and dignity of its own, and we are grateful
for this history, others more so than myself, because most of what
is written therein I knew already, and I wanted a secret which is not
revealed. I wanted to know more about the working of the imagination
which planted the little snow-white feet in the sally garden, and which
heard the kettle on the hob sing peace into the breast, and was intimate
with twilight and the creatures that move in the dusk and undergrowths,
with weasel, heron, rabbit, hare, mouse and coney; which plucked the
Flower of Immortality in the Island of Statues and wandered with Usheen
in Timanogue. I wanted to know what all that magic-making meant to the
magician, but he has kept his own secret, and I must be content and
grateful to one who has revealed more of beauty than any other in his
time.

1916

THE POETRY OF JAMES STEPHENS

For a generation the Irish bards have endeavored to live in a palace of
art, in chambers hung with the embroidered cloths and made dim with pale
lights and Druid twilights, and the melodies they most sought for were
half soundless. The art of an early age began softly, to end its songs
with a rhetorical blare of sound. The melodies of the new school began
close to the ear and died away in distances of the soul. Even as the
prophet of old was warned to take off his shoes because the place he
stood on was holy ground, so it seemed for a while in Ireland as if no
poet could be accepted unless he left outside the demesnes of poetry
that very useful animal, the body, and lost all concern about its
habits. He could not enter unless he moved with the light and dreamy
foot-fall of spirit. Mr. Yeats was the chief of this eclectic school,
and his poetry at its best is the most beautiful in Irish literature.
But there crowded after him a whole horde of verse-writers, who seized
the most obvious symbols he used and standardized them, and in their
writings one wandered about, gasping for fresh air land sunlight, for
the Celtic soul seemed bound for ever pale lights of fairyland on the
north and by the by the darkness of forbidden passion on the