thing in the book is its unfeigned humanity. So we have a personal
puzzle to solve with this perplexing writer which makes us all the
more eager to hear him again. A man might be difficult to understand
and the problem of his personality might not be worth solution, but
it is not so with James Stephens. From a man who can write with
such power as he shows in these two stanzas taken from "The Street
behind Yours" we may expect high things. It is a vision seen with
distended imagination as if by some child strayed from light:

And though 'tis silent, though no sound
Crawls from the darkness thickly spread,
Yet darkness brings
Grim noiseless things
That walk as they were dead,
They glide and peer and steal around
With stealthy silent tread.

You dare not walk; that awful crew
Might speak or laugh as you pass by.
Might touch or paw
With a formless claw
Or leer from a sodden eye,
Might whisper awful things they knew,
Or wring their hands and cry.

There is nothing more grim and powerful than that in The City of
Dreadful Night. It has all the vaporous horror of a Dore grotesque
and will bear examination better. But our poet does not as a rule
write with such unrelieved gloom. He keeps a stoical cheerfulness,
and even when he faces terrible things we feel encouraged to take