now class with Shelley and Keats and those other great ones cut down
with their work unfinished. Yet I would not speak specially of him,
lest modern critics should run away with their mad notion of a one-man
influence; and call this a "school" of Francis Thompson. Francis
Thompson was not a schoolmaster. He would have said as freely as Whitman
(and with a far more consistent philosophy), "I charge you to leave all
free, as I have left all free." The modern world has this mania about
plagiarism because the modern world cannot comprehend the idea of
communion. It thinks that men must steal ideas; it does not understand
that men may share them. The saints did not imitate each other; not
always even study each other; they studied the Imitation of Christ.
A real religion is that in which any two solitary people might suddenly
say the same thing at any moment. It would therefore be most misleading
to give to this collection an air of having been inspired by its most
famous contributor. The little lyrics of this little book must surely
be counted individual, even by those who may count them mysterious.
A variety verging on quaintness is the very note of the assembled bards.

Take, for example, Mr. Colum's stern and simple rendering of the bitter
old Irish verses:

"O woman, shapely as the swan,
On your account I shall not die."

Like Fitzgerald's Omar and all good translations, it leaves one
wondering whether the original was as good; but to an Englishman the
note is not only unique, but almost hostile. It is the hardness of the
real Irishman which has been so skilfully hidden under the softness of
the stage Irishman. The words are ages old, I believe; they come out of
the ancient Ireland of Cairns and fallen Kings: and yet the words might