in sheer gaiety: flies like any bird under the boughs, and up into
the sunlight. There are in his company imps and grotesques, and
fauns and satyrs, who come summoned by his piping. Sometimes, as
in "Eve," the poem of the mystery of womanhood, he is purely beautiful,
but I find myself going back to his men and women; and I hope he
will not be angry with me when I say I prefer his tinker drunken to
his Deity sober. None of our Irish poets has found God, at least a
god any but themselves would not be ashamed to acknowledge. But
our poet does know his men and his women. They are not the shadowy,
Whistler-like decorative suggestions of humanity made by our poetic
dramatists. They have entered like living creatures into his mind,
and they break out there in an instant's unforgettable passion or
agony, and the wild words fly up to the poet's brain to match
their emotion. I do not know whether the verses entitled "The Brute"
are poetry, but they have an amazing energy of expression.

But our poet can be beautiful when he wills, and sometimes, too,
he has largeness and grandeur of vision and expression. Look at
this picture of the earth, seen from mid-heaven:

And so he looked to where the earth, asleep,
Rocked with the moon. He saw the whirling sea
Swing round the world in surgent energy,
Tangling the moonlight in its netted foam,
And nearer saw the white and fretted dome
Of the ice-capped pole spin back a larded ray
To whistling stars, bright as a wizard's day,
But these he passed with eyes intently wide,
Till closer still the mountains he espied,
Squatting tremendous on the broad-backed earth,