have volumes in the
booksellers and some in the hands of the printers. But there is one
shy singer of the group of writers in New Songs who might easily get
overlooked because his verse takes little or no thought of the past
or present or future of his country: yet the slim book in which is
collected Seumas O'Sullivan's verses reveals a true poet, and if he is
too shy to claim his country in his verses there is no reason why his
country should not claim him, for he is in his way as Irish as any of
our singers. He is, as Mr. W. B. Yeats was in his earlier days, the
literary successor of those old Gaelic poets who were fastidious in
their verse, who loved little in this world but some chance light in it
which reminded them of fairyland, or who, if they were in love, loved
their mistress less for her own sake than because some turn of her head,
or "a foam-pale breast," carried their impetuous imaginations past her
beauty into memories of Helen of Troy, Deirdre, or some other symbol
of that remote and perfect beauty which, however man desires, he shall
embrace only at the end of time. I think the wives or mistresses of
these old poets must have been very unhappy, for women wish to be loved
for what they know about themselves, and for the tenderness which is in
their hearts, and not because some colored twilight invests them with a
shadowy beauty not their own, and which they know they can never
carry into the light of day. These poets of the transient look and the
evanescent light do not help us to live our daily life, but they do
something which is as necessary. They educate and refine the spirit so
that it shall not come altogether without any understanding of delicate
loveliness into the Kingdom of Heaven, or gaze on Timanoge with the
crude blank misunderstanding of Cockney tourists staring up at the
stupendous dreams pictured on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. These
fastidious scorners of every day and its interests are always looking
through nature for "the herbs before they were in the field and every
flower before it grew," and through women for the Eve who was in the
imagination of the Lord before she was embodied, and we all need this
refining vision more than we know. It may be asked of us hereafter when
we would mount up into the towers of vision, "How can you desire the
beauty you have not seen, who have not sought or loved its shadow in
the world?" and the Gates of Ivory may not swing open at our knock. This
wi