inheritors of many traditions, and have now come to the end of the
ways, and so are unhappy. We know why they are unhappy, but not
the cause of a strange merriment which sometimes they feel, unless
it be that beauty within itself has a joy in its own rhythmic being.
They are changing, too, as the winds and waters have changed. They
are not like Usheen, seekers and romantic wanderers, but have each
found some mood in themselves where all quest ceases; they utter
oracles, and even in the swaying of a hand or the dropping of hair
there is less suggestion of individual action than of a divinity
living within them, shaping an elaborate beauty in dream for his
own delight, and for no other end than the delight in his dream.
Other poets have written of Wisdom overshadowing man and speaking
through his lips, or a Will working within the human will, but I
think in this poetry we find for the first time the revelation of
the Spirit as the weaver of beauty. Hence it comes that little
hitherto unnoticed motions are adored:

You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,
And bind up your long hair and sigh;
And all men's hearts must burn and beat.

This woman is less the beloved than the priestess of beauty who
reveals the divinity, not as the inspired prophetesses filled with
the Holy Breath did in the ancient mysteries, but in casual gestures
and in a waving of her white arms, in the stillness of her eyes,
in her hair which trembles like a faery flood of unloosed shadowy
light over pale breasts, and in many glimmering motions so beautiful
that it is at once seen whose footfall it is we hear, and that the
place where she stands is holy ground. This, it seems to me, is
what is essential in this poetry, what is peculiar and individual